Nucular Hydrogen Economy 668
Mark Baard writes "The hydrogen economy will at least in part be based on nukes. The DOE will build a pilot high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), which theoretically can co-generate electricity and hydrogen, side by side, inside a cheap modular unit."
nucular??? (Score:5, Funny)
mark baard is a whore (Score:4, Interesting)
observe...
submitter: Mark Baard
url: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0322/baard.php
the story:
It's Nucular
by Mark Baard
May 28 - June 3, 2003
Re:mark baard is a whore (Score:4, Insightful)
E.g., he makes a snide insinuation that energy producing companies don't do research on new ways of producing energy.
Basic research (that won't pay off in decades, if ever) tend to be financed by governments. Fusion is an example. (And companies researching new kinds of power plants tend to be the companies that build energy plants (ABB, etc) -- not the companies running power plants!)
For another point, Baard wrote: Scientists have not yet designed a nuclear facility whose safety and efficiency trumps that of gas or coal.
Well, the fallout of coal based power plants kill people. Quite a few people. If you compare the number of people killed by coal in USA/KWh and the number killed by nuclear power/KWh, I am quite certain that nuclear power has been safer than coal for the last decades.
I don't really have an opinion on the subject of the article. I need to get facts from more dependable sources -- that don't have so many axes to grind that it could arm a viking army... (My basic position on long-term energy is that funding for fusion research should probably be larger.)
Re:Gee...imagine that! (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be more accurate to say that Bush is in bed with the energy comapnies. Enron was the most famous example of a company non-oil energy company (though they certainly had oil related holdings) that basically bought GWB the election. Most large companies in the energy industry are diversified, so if they have oil holdings, thay likely have nuclear holdings as well.
If you had read the article, you would know that it isn't critical of Hydrogen power, it's critical of the Bush plan to create the hydrogen. If you can't do that cleanly & safely (something the nuclear industry's record suggests they can't do), then what's the point of switching to hydrogen in the first place? The only group that will benefit from this plan is the energy industry who will get billions of dollars of free money for so called "R&D".
Finally, as for the spelling of "nucular" in the title... Get the joke, people! It's a rather obvious parody of GWB & his well known inability to pronounce nuclear. Just because there's an apparent error in slashdot, doesn't mean that you should immediately post pointing it out. Perhaps if you spent thirty seconds thinking about it, you'd see that it was intentional.
Re:Gee...imagine that! (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you think most all the H2 we use today comes from? it's split from natural gas. Most of that gas is from drilling oil wells, it's on top of the oil and until not to long ago was burned off.
In the future it will be split from water, but this needs power, hense the nuclear. H2 is for portable use, it's not for powerplants and such. In the future they will all be nuclear, wind, geothermal and other non coal, gas, oil methods.
Oil companies are energy companies. They will adjust to what ever comes.
I don't really get what you were getting at with the liberal thing. Maybe it's because people like myself hate how Bush went from bashing and making fun of hybrid cars and things like fuel cells, to acting like he is their champion. Also he touts a hyrdrogen economy, this simple isn't the future, there isn't an oil economy ether, it's a product of republicans minds to try and get insane oil policys.
Re:nucular??? (Score:5, Funny)
"Omigosh! They're building a nuclear power plant in our town!"
"No, it's a nucular plant."
"Oh, that's alright then. Whew!"
Rebranding works. Right, Philip Morris [philipmorris.com]?
You're not likey to hear that (Score:3, Insightful)
I work at a nuke plant. This is my third summer as an intern in their IT department. My dad has worked in various nuke plants all of my life and then some. I don't understand why people are so damned afraid of these things. I know how safe they are, and I'm not the slightest bit afraid of anything happenin
Re:You're not likey to hear that (Score:4, Funny)
That's what they said about the Titanic too.
Re:While I'm not surprised... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got quite a functional sense of humour, thanks. Can't say the same for the writers, if this was his intention. First off, it's just not funny. Second, if it was intentional, the convention would be to write it in quotes.
As it is, they just made themselves look illiterate, or humour-impaired, take your pick.
Nucular? (Score:5, Funny)
Spell Czech?
Re:Nucular? (Score:5, Informative)
Erik Baard
Re:Nucular? (Score:3)
Well, maybe it's not that we're stupid... maybe it's that your brother isn't that funny.
Re:Nucular? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bring on the nuclear power and dump the fossil fuels! Thank God someone in government has some sense.
- Necron69
Re:Nucular? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to predict how much radiation will penetrate how much ground, so bury it deep and job done. If you're worried about it, don't live near there (hell, the US is big enough you hardly need to worry about that - plenty of places with big areas of sod all!).
Re the birth defects, there's no proven correlation between nuclear storage sites and any birth defects. Also compare and contrast to coal-fired power station emissions which have been shown decades ago to cause birth defects, illness, acid rain, deforestation, death of wildlife in area, etc. Air-scrubbers exist to prevent this, but few power stations use them bcos they cost money to set up and use, and most governments won't mandate them.
And just bcos ppl are fighting it, it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. For a US example, 150 years ago half a nation fought to keep slavery in place! Most ppl don't understand nuclear, or have been given misinformation by anti-nuclear protestors - either way, ppl get frightened and don't react logically. And with the gov involved too, you get all the anti-gov conspiracies in there too. Logic tends to have a poor survival rate in this situation.
Grab.
Re:Nucular? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait a sec, let me get this straight. You favour nuclear rocketry, but you're afraid of power plants? Do you realise how utterly insane that sounds?
In case it gets /.'ed (it's already getting slow) (Score:5, Informative)
On a sunny Saturday morning 30 years from now, you may decide to take your family for a ride to the country. You'll still be driving a car, and you may still get stuck in traffic. But that's OK, because the only thing you'll be breathing in is water vapor from the car in front of you.
Welcome to the seemingly benign "hydrogen economy" President Bush has touted over the past year. Pollution-free cars. Abundant fuel. A cleaner environment.
But there's one factor the president isn't talking much about: the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new nuclear power plants his administration imagines making all of that hydrogen.
The Bush administration and Senate Republicans want to give billions of taxpayer dollars to the nuclear industry to make high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs), which--theoretically--can co-generate electricity and hydrogen, side by side, inside cheap modular reactors. Advocates of the plants say they wouldn't need the expensive protections required for traditional models.
This summer, the Senate is expected to vote on the Energy Policy Act of 2003, which includes funding for new HTGR plants and the construction of a pilot co-generation facility to be run by the U.S. Department of Energy in Idaho. The bill was sent to the full chamber by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last month.
Spokespeople for the committee and the DOE say the aim is to cut greenhouse emissions, since energy companies continue to use coal and natural gas in making hydrogen. But small, modular HTGR plants may do it more efficiently and cleanly, they said.
That all depends, of course, on how you define "cleanly." To extract hydrogen from water--to get the H out of the H2O--you first have to make steam. The modular nuclear plants would do that without polluting the air, but would also leave behind radioactive waste.
Scientists have not yet designed a nuclear facility whose safety and efficiency trumps that of gas or coal. One proposal, from MIT, has a nuclear reactor sitting under the same roof as a chemical plant bubbling with sulfuric acid and hydrogen iodide.
Each modular plant would produce as little as one-tenth of the energy of a single light-water reactor. And since by some estimates the United States would need the equivalent of 500 light-water reactors to produce enough hydrogen, it may take thousands of modular plants to get the same job done.
The nuke industry, not surprisingly, says it's interested in joining the hydrogen economy. Entergy, the second-largest nuclear energy producer in the U.S., hopes to break ground on its co-generation Freedom Reactor within five years.
But only the feds seem willing to pay for the research and development that would make the futuristic plants a reality. "We generate electricity," said a spokesperson for Exelon, the country's largest producer. "We're not heavily involved in funding research and development."
Taxpayers may soon be. The Senate's energy bill affords the DOE $1.1 billion to build an HTGR co-generation nuclear plant at its Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory within 10 years.
The bill also proposes to kick-start a nuke renaissance by subsidizing half the cost of six to 10 new HTGR power plants in the United States.
"We need to move toward clean-air energy sources that are more reliable than wind and solar," said Marnie Funk, a spokesperson for New Mexico Republican senator Pete Domenici, chair of the energy and resources committee.
Renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, are emissions-free. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Many people also see wind turbines as an eyesore: Cape Codders are fighting plans for an offshore wind farm that would obstruct their views. "And then you've got the bird issue," said Funk. Wind turbines earned some notoriety by killing as many as 50 golden eagles along California's Altamont Pass during the 1990s.
Today, w
Re:In case it gets /.'ed (it's already getting slo (Score:4, Insightful)
We're talking about emissions during generation of electricity, not during creation of the device used to generate it.
If you want to talk about waste during production, don't forget that gas and coal generators have nontrivial waste as side products of their creation, as well. Compare a couple of buckets of nice sand, maybe some heavy metals, wire, and some plastic for solar cell production, to lots of steel and other metals that get strip-mined, not to mention oil, a lot more wire, etc., for gas/coal-burning generation.
If that doesn't convince you, take a look at all the oil and stuff needed to keep generators going, versus maybe spraying the surface of the solar cells with water every now and again to get the grit off...
Re:In case it gets /.'ed (it's already getting slo (Score:4, Informative)
There are some really nasty things that go into manufacturing some PV cells. Copper Indium Diselenide (copper, indium and selnium) requires hydrogen selenide which is a really really nasty gas. All that plastic, glass, arsenic, silicon, gallium, etc.
Revival of a Program (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Revival of a Program (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow! That must have been a neat trick, considering he became president in 1993.
Re:Revival of a Program (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Revival of a Program (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider the amount of dioxins and radioactivity produced by a coal plant. Is that better?
Some people put granite in their houses. It is radioactive but people do not seem to care. The Sun emits radioactivity. In fact if it was not for radioactivity we probably would not even be here because evolution would have been slower!
The fact is humans tolerate a certain amount of radiation. Regarding Plutonium being poisonous do you know Caffeine is more poisonous than Plutonium? Think about it next time you have a cup of Coffee or drink Jolt.
Nagasaki was nuked with Plutonium and people live there now. A nuclear plant meltdown makes way less radiation than any nuclear weapon.
There are nuclear plant designs which are inherently safer. They shutdown automatically without outside control when there is a problem.
If we actually recycled nuclear fuel there would be less or even zero waste. But due to some peaceniks with fear of proliferation we do not and the waste is piling up.
I am politically left oriented and, yes, green. I think we should spend more money on renewables. I think we should introduce measures to reduce CO and CO2. I think we should ban single-hulled oil tankers and if possible reduce oil consumption.
Being against nuclear power of any form whatsoever is blindingly dumb and I am glad people are starting to smart up.
Nobody wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard but no one wants a water treatment plant in their backyard either. Maybe you would prefer we went back to the time honoured tradition of dumping untreated sewers directly on the river?
Re:Revival of a Program (Score:5, Interesting)
Whoa, I just went to do some googling to prove you stupid but all I could come up with are this [ox.ac.uk], this [oism.org], and this [ox.ac.uk]. These give the LD50 data for both of these substances. LD50 means the lethal dose that kills 50% of a given population within 30 days (given in milligrams of substance per kilogram of body mass).
Caffeine has an LD50 of 57-260 mg/kg, while plutonium has an LD50 similar to that of pantothenic acid which is up to 10 g/kg (if taken orally) or 820 mg/kg (if injected). Caffeine is clearly more toxic than plutonium according to this! I still don't quite believe this, so can someone come up with better numbers or a good reason why this isn't the case?
Re:Revival of a Program (Score:3, Insightful)
Caffeine has an LD50 of 57-260 mg/kg, while plutonium has an LD50 similar to that of pantothenic acid which is up to 10 g/kg (if taken orally) or 820 mg/kg (if injected). Caffeine is clearly more toxic than plutonium according to this! I still don't quite believe this, so can someone come up with better numbers or a good reason why this isn't the case?
As you stated, this LD50 figure is ties to the likelihood of death within 30 days. If even a little of that Pu239 gets stuck in the body, it can cause ca
Swallowing plutonium is stupid and ineffective (Score:5, Informative)
Plutonium is primarily(*) an alpha emitter, which means the radiation gets absorbed in a really short distance.
The worst thing you can do to yourself with a small amount of plutonium is to inhale it in finely divided form. Then zillions of particles can lodge in your lungs and each one will zap the neighboring millimeter of tissue until it finally goes cancerous.
In case you're wondering, last time I looked at a toxicology reference, plutonium likes to settle out of the bloodstream in bone.
So the answer to your question is basically that swallowing X amount of an organic toxin that targest your metabolism can be worse, *in the short term*, than swallowing the same amount of a heavy radioactive metal.
(*) There's also interesting things like neutrons from spontaneous fission in some isotopes, etc.
Re:Revival of a Program (Score:3, Funny)
If it's all the same to you, I'll just keep having that cup of coffee, and avoid that cup of plutonium.
Re:Revival of a Program (Score:3, Informative)
No, actually it doesn't. Plutonium is an alpha emitter. Before the core was placed in the Fat Man bomb tested at Alamogordo people were passing the plutonium core around. It was about the size of a grapefruit and warm to the touch. Plutonium-239 doesn't emit a lot of radioactivity, that's why it has a 250,000 year half life. Now, if you want something that emits high energy particles that will k
Re:because wind costs less (Score:5, Informative)
On the contrary, the 3 cents/kwh figure for wind includes real estate costs. The 12 cents/kwh for nuclear does not include the external waste disposal costs.
The 14,000 acre area is enough wind power for the enitre United States of America using today's most modern 2.5 megawatt turbines with syncronized directionality. The land below can usually be used for farming or grazing.
The surplus and battery banks necessary are insignificant. Although the wind stops and starts, it is usually blowing somewhere on the grid. Existing grid generators will probably be phased out over time as they are replaced with surplus turbines and PEM-electrolysis fuel cell hydrogen storage tanks.
Re:Revival of a Program (Score:4, Informative)
Assuming the plant detonates. This kind of reactor doesn't. Although a water cooled one of this type would be better (shutting off the cooling shuts off the reactor in this type).
"Just like I can tolerate only a certain amount of stupidity."
I wouldn't make comments like that if I were you.
"Plutonium, did you know that Marie Curie died in agony of multiple debilitating cancers"
Try reading sometime. [216.239.51.100]
"How are you even able to post on Slashdot?"
Sure, he was wrong, but that question applies even more to you. You accused him of inaccuracy and didn't even fact-check... Are you implying that Nagasaki wasn't bombed by plutonium [ccnr.org] or that the thousands of deaths from a power plant melting down [nci.org]is more than the amount of deaths caused by a nuke? [nukefix.org]
"You can't "shut down" the process of radioactive decay"
No, but you can shut down what powers a nuclear plant, the chain reaction.
"It's all the peacenik's fault that we have nuclear waste"
Your reading comprehension sucks. Try reading what he says. Let me rephrase to make it easier on you. "If we recycle the waste, less of it will be in dumps, and the anti-nuke people make this impossible, even though it can be safe." And before you get stupid on me again, note that not all of it would be safe, etc. But some, if not most, of that can be recycled, but that option is blocked by paranoia.
"What does this have to do with a lot of outrageous misinformation regarding radioactivity and nuclear waste?"
He was explaining and giving examples of why he would be considered 'green'. This is called an informal version of 'establishing credentials". He has. You haven't. I have... at the least, I've shown I know how to use google, which you have failed to do.
"You've got a long way to go yourself, pal"
Pot, stop talking to the kettle, you're giving me a headache.
"What the hell does this have to do with nuclear waste?"
I don't know, sewage vs. nuke waste, seems a fairly decent analogy to me. Maybe I'm just smarter than you.
Where do you think H2 comes from? (Score:5, Interesting)
Natural gas, mostly methane (CH3) is reacted with steam (H2O) such that CH3 + 2H2O = CO2 + 3.5H2
So, when somebody says he wants a hydrogen powered vehicle, what he really means is he wants a natural gas powered vehicle.
-AD
Re:Where do you think H2 comes from? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, AFAIK, there is a much smaller supply of natural gas than of H2O to make H2 from.
Answer: Chalupas! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Answer: Chalupas! (Score:3, Funny)
Every time my friend says "I'm going to get gas", I say "Bring me back a Chalupa?"
It was funny 300 times, but not 301 times.
Re:Where do you think H2 comes from? (Score:5, Informative)
CH4 + H2O => CO + 3H2
H2O + CO => CO2 + H2
which means at the end:
CH4 + 2H2O => CO2 + 4H2
see: http://www.howstuffworks.com/fuel-processor2.htm
Re:Where do you think H2 comes from? (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I'm aware, heating methane to 1600K produces acetylene and hydrogen.
Re:Where do you think H2 comes from? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I would be perfectly happy with nuclear power of the types that are being discussed today: small scale, small risk. Running 10 small reactors instead of 1 large light-water reactor means less centralized risk and so on. I could stand behind something like that alot easier than three mile island.
$0.02 deposited.
Look at the economies of scale though (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, yes, the startup costs for the process are greater for the nuclear route, since building a reactor is more costly than building an equivalent methane processing chemical plant.
However, on the grand scale needed to provide hydrogen as a significant fuel source to the nation, the cost of the source of the hydrogen will be significantly greater than the cost of production.
With the nuclear route, the bulk of the costs is up-front, and semi-annual for nuclear fuel. With the chemical route, the costs are linear, and grow in proportion to production.
Water is infinitely cheaper, and more abundant, than natural gas.
Consider also the cost of the infrastructure needed to transport the source of the hydrogen. Gas pipelines are more expensive, and more dangerous, than water pipes. And you only need the pipelines when you can't drill for water. But you can, almost anywhere.
Re:Where do you think H2 comes from? (Score:3, Insightful)
You herd of Cows?
-AD
no it doesn't (Score:3, Insightful)
you mean "raises the question"
Time to cut the French some slack .... (Score:5, Funny)
OK, we can cut it out with this "Freedom" stuff everywhere now. Tell Entergy that they can go back to calling it their "French" Reactor again, the war is over.
Importance of research and computer modeling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Importance of research and computer modeling (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Importance of research and computer modeling (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the 80s when I was in college, this was a point I argued over and over at enviro meetings. I was usually shouted down.
The media did a wonderful job of "educating" (read spreading FUD) about the real dangers of nuclear plants as compared to the dangers of coal and oil fired plants. All the crap (and Jane Fonda and that *bleep bleep* movie) produced a totally misinformed public. Chernobyl didn't help any either, despite the fact that is was very badly designed and run.
As a couple other posters have noted, the French produce a majority of their electricity with NP, and have NEVER had a serious accident (mostly because they use advanced designs and they vet their employees very, very carefully)...
One of the things I remember about being in S. Utah in '91 was the amount of smog in the deserts produced by those coal plants. But hey, they provided jobs....
Make no mistake, people - the main reason that nuclear power is so expensive in the US is because of media and political FUD.
SB
Re:Importance of research and computer modeling (Score:3, Informative)
Nuclear waste (Score:3, Interesting)
The only safe way of getting rid of them would be to send them into the sun, but that would take (with today's technology) make more waste than what it would get rid of.
Re:Nuclear waste (Score:4, Insightful)
two birds with one stone. (Score:4, Interesting)
So you shoot it out of the solar system (delta v for that is actually smaller than dropping it into the sun). When you reprocess the waste to reduce its mass, you make it hot enough for use in RTG power sources that can run sensors and a transmitter. You wind up with a large number of space probes to explore near interstellar space and you get rid of the waste.
SEP Containment (Score:5, Funny)
nuclear waste .. (Score:3)
I think the keyword is "could" and that might be stretching it
No kidding... AND... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds good to me (Score:5, Insightful)
If nuclear power can have the added side effect of producing Hydrogen to use in hydrogen power, then great, that's just one more advantage. Now if only we could convince the U.S. to use breeder reactors so that there wouldn't be quite so much of that pesky nuclear waste that the protestors keep going so much on about.
Note to the anti-nuclear protesters and PETA: You are not doing anything productive, you are reflecting badly on "the left", and you are pre-empting actual important work being done by others because when faced with a PETA or anti-nuclear story the news will run it, because those are issues that catch the public's eye, but when faced with a story in which people are protesting real, harmful corporate abuses they don't run it, because hey, they did the "protester" thing with the PETA story yesterday. Please go away.
(Although i will recognize the people complaining about the nuclear waste dump site near Las Vegas have a point-- building a nuclear waste containment policy in a *mountain* on a *fault line*, even a small fault line, is just a fucking dumb idea.)
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:3, Funny)
Excuse me, Professor Xavier is calling me...
because wind costs much less (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus, the new wind turbine models can power the entire U.S. in only 14,000 acres [slashdot.org]. If trends continue, by this time next year, wind will be approaching two cents/kwh, placing it firmly under European coal, and in two years it will be on parity with dirty U.S. coal, which is presently running around 1.5 cents.
I need to check Howard Dean's web site [deanforamerica.com] to make sure he knows all this.
just the usual subsidies of big donors (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the main benefits of a hydrogen economy is that you can generate hydrogen cleanly and efficiently in places where there is a lot of sunshine (and access to water) and ship the hydrogen safely to places that need it. Just like oil, only safer, more environmentally friendly, and renewable. And the US has lots of regions that are good for that kind of solar generation of hydrogen.
The Bush administration and Senate Republicans want to give billions of taxpayer dollars to the nuclear industry to make high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs),
I'd prefer greenhouse gases to nuclear waste. Greenhouse gases may end up causing lots of devastation, but they probably go away within a matter of centuries. Nuclear waste poses a lethal risk for tens of thousands of years and can be used for creating dirty bombs and other mischief.
I get the feeling that Bush administration policies can largely explained as using popular issues ("the environment", "national security", etc.) as an excuse to transfer large amounts of government subsidies to big donors.
Re:just the usual subsidies of big donors (Score:3, Insightful)
No. For a few reasons:
a) making hydrogen from water is really inefficient (commercial production is done from methane, because it's wayyyy easier/cheaper/less energy)
b) shipping hydrogen around is at best a total nuisance. Hydrogen is incredibly voluminous, even in liquid form [14x l
Anti-nuclear article as science? (Score:3, Insightful)
TurboD
Iceland and H2 (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm jazzed (Score:5, Insightful)
Heck, maybe the US can finally sneak into Kyoto if this goes through! Could it be possible that *gasp* GWB might make the US a cleaner place while anti-nuke environmental nut Al Gore screwed the pooch on this one? What is the world coming to?
If the people pay for the research (Score:3, Interesting)
None of this "donated to the public" bullshit.
If some chiseler is going to get a free ride on government patents, he's going to pay a cash license fee for it.
Recent Wired Article Glossed Over This (Score:5, Informative)
The article's relentless insistence on how THE GOVERNMENT MUST MUST MUST IMMEDIATELY LAUNCH A Manhattan-project-like effort to develop a hydrogen economy and SAVE AMERICA reminded me of those Anime Otakudom [jhu.edu] lines about "The World Will Be Saved By Steam!", or like various other rants that people go on, usually political or anti-drug. Sure, there's good technical discussion in there about fuel cells and storage issues, but that's not really what it's about.
So Remember, Kids, Hydrogen isn't the answer! Professor Steamhead [ev1.net] says ""Steam. Water plus heat equals steam. Always remember this. The world can be saved by steam." and he's got a giant steam-powered mecha robot to do the job with!
Re:Recent Wired Article Glossed Over This (Score:3, Informative)
Why do people... (Score:5, Informative)
If anyone can find a copy of it online, there's an excellent article from the Dec 8, 1978 issue of Science that provides some perspective. Someone cranked the numbers for the concentration of uranium in coal and America's yearly consumption, and (if I remember it correctly) they found that the trace levels of uranium were actually high enough that we'd have gotten more energy from using it in a fission reactor than from burning the coal. That means that it'd be far more than the amount of uranium consumed in reactors each year, and it's all just going straight into the atmosphere.
We keep the article posted in our undergraduate physics lab, just in case people start complaining about the weak little sources we use for radioactivity-based experiments.
Re:Why do people... (Score:4, Informative)
Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger [ornl.gov]
Sorry guys....too busy today
SB
Before you post about spelling (Score:3, Informative)
Okay, now you can post
Haha... (Score:3, Funny)
If nuclear is bad, and fossil-fuel is bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets face up to the fact that no energy source is 'suitable' for the environmental movement.
Solar panels create toxic waste as a byproduct of their manufacture; endangered birds fly into the blades of wind turbines (yes, this has been raised as an issue!).
Blah.
-- Greg
How much power? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I found on the web says that a car moving at highway speeds uses about 15 kW of power. The standard estimate for domestic power use is 1 kW averaged throughout the day.
Back of the envelope, let's say 10 million Californicators spend an hour a day in their cars. Averaged over 24 hours, this is over 6 GW. Entire daytime power usage in CA is about 35 GW (depending on season). And this doesn't account for SUVs using more power or commercial trucking.
I would be interested in seeing a real estimate, but it looks like this would require a substantial increase in power production facilities.
And this leads to a sticky question. If we can provide electricity via renewables to generate hydrogen, as the administration suggests we can, why aren't we using using renewables for half our energy now!
Isolated reactor? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't mean to sound Socialist... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can disagree and call me a socialist bastard, but I just don't think something so basic as power generation should be in the hands of people who are trying to make a profit out of it. I'm sure that those of you in California who suffer through summer brown outs might agree with me if you think about it.
Furthermore, the Federal Government has a huge advantage going for it. They don't have to turn a profit. The military sure never came close to it, and we love spending money on them (with good reason). But imagine the safety regulations and procedures and the environmental guidelines that could be implemented with government control of power plants.
The U.S. Navy has never had a nuclear incident or accident, despite running a significant portion of the worlds nuclear plants with guys under 30 that don't have college educations. Why? Because no one asks the Navy to make a profit. They can afford to spend the extra money on safety measures, education for those operators and strict guidelines.
French Nuclear Industry (Score:5, Informative)
France derives 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity, and gains some EUR 2.6 billion per year from this.
Wastes: The national policy is to reprocess spent fuel so as to recover uranium and plutonium for re-use and to reduce the volume of high-level wastes for disposal. Waste disposal is being pursued under France's 1991 Waste Management Act which sets the direction of research which is mainly undertaken at the Bure underground rock laboratory in eastern France, situated in clays. Another laboratory is researching granites.
SPS - Solar Power Stations (Score:3, Interesting)
Whilst the original designs for these were costed in the billions - intelligent design and utilisation of space bourne resources would reduce the costs by orders of magnitude.
No more pollution. No more need to build new power stations (coal, gas, nuclear, wind, solar, wave, etc). Just a few fields of photovoltaic arrays a few square kilometres across and the use of existing distribution networks.
Re:SPS - Solar Power Stations (Score:3, Informative)
A better bet is lasers with tuned photovoltaic cells at the receiver. You can get upwards of 80% efficiency and the spot beam diameter at 36000km (geostationary orbit - sunlight about 99.5% of the time) is only about 140m.
The best bit about doing it in space is actually the fact that you can use low efficiency c
Nuclear power for the third world? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to see them print up the amount of waste and the life expectancy of each. How much nuclear waste will there be? How much will there be if recycling of this waste is allowed? Yes, even nuclear waste can be recycled.
Compare this to coal and oil, how much waste is generated by these. How long does it remain? Since it's dumping is not as strictly controlled how long will it's effects last in the environment? Even if it's dumping is as strictly controlled how long can this waste have the potential to effect the environment?
This looks to be a good site for information on HTGR technology.
http://www.iaea.or.at/inis/aws/htgr/
If you go to google and search for "coal waste" you won't find any numbers, but you will find page after page of information, most of it high signal to noise.
This is not a simple subject, to allow many countries to enjoy the lifestyle of 1st worlders a
reasonably clean, reasonably non-polluting ENERGY SOURCE is needed. Hydrogen is not an energy source but a storage method that has some appeal. Current nuclear politics are geared to keeping the third world, third and subservient.
A form of nuclear power that is easy to control, cannot easily be converted for weapons use and is within the capabilities of third world countries to install and maintain (and eventually manufacture) would be one method of improving their relative wealth and all that comes with this.
We should do it with power from space! (Score:3, Informative)
Why aren't we at least spending more money on research in this area? So many billions are spent on nuclear power, but space-based solar power is the ONLY way we'll ever move beyond Kardashev leve 0.7 [angelfire.com]!
"Cheap modular reactors" (Score:3, Insightful)
Standardized modules will cut costs and also make them safer; discovered bugs can be fixed in all installations.
Tor
Generate power by walking and driving (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC, this doesn't offset the energy cost to actually move the cars on the road or whatever, but it's simply a supplemental return. I have no idea how viable the whole thing would be, it just felt pertinent to mention again. Comments, corrections, etc?
Re:Fortunately for the Slashdot crew... (Score:4, Insightful)
Coal powered car? (Score:4, Insightful)
However, if you use hydrogen from "steam cracking" of natural gas (CH3), then you have a natural gas powered car.
Nobody said the hydrogen was free!
-AD
Re:Coal powered car? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Coal powered car? (Score:5, Informative)
CH4 - Methane
C2H6 - Ethane
C3H8 - Propane
C4H10 - Butane
Are the most simple Alkane Hydrocarbons that we use fuel, and because of there saturation they are relatively stable, just flammable.
Medevo
Re:Coal powered car? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are also deposits of frozen methane under the ocean floor. If an easy way could be found to mine this it would provide a pretty much limitless supply of hydrogen.
Re:FINALLY! (Score:5, Insightful)
I would prefer fusion, but that hasn't been done yet. Next on my list would be space based solar power, but sadly that might take longer to be ready than fusion. The only answer that is right-here-right-now is nuclear fission. Done properly it will not only reduce carbon emissions it will even reduce the amount of radiation released into the environment (it seems counterintuitive, but a typical coal power plant will release more radioisotopes into the environment than a typical nuke plant on a per Megawatt of power produced basis).
People just have to get over their knee-jerk prejudices. Unfortunately it may be easier to solve the engineering & infrastructure problems with fusion or space solar power than it would be to get the newsmedia to engage in a sane discussion about the risks and benefits of nuclear fission. Too many of them got everything they know about nuclear power from watching China Syndrome.
Re:FINALLY! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd really just like to hear proponets of nuclear energy production talk about all the costs involved in g
Re:FINALLY! (Score:4, Insightful)
And when the sheeple are ingorant enough about the physics involved that they can be swayed by "Not In My Back Yard" types and hysterical appeals to "oh no, it's nyuookyular, we're all gonna die!", politicians that want to get re-elected have to put up with it.
For the record, I support Yucca Mountain. If they'd let me, I'd be happy to buy land right on top of the damn thing.
So "Yes. In my back yard."
With Yucca, it's not gonna be in anybody's back yard; for obvious security reasons, the nearest home is gonna be miles away. Of course, to the "we're all gonna die!" crowd, 10 miles, 20 miles, 100 miles, 500 miles, is still "their back yard".
There's no negotiation with the more radical end of the environmental spectrum, because their real goal is the curtailment of human activity in general - stopping nuclear power is merely a means to that end. If oil's banned for greenhouse gases (that haven't been conclusively shown to increase global temperatures), and nuclear power is banned for radioactivity (that hasn't been shown to leak from sites like Yucca), it'll be solar (dangerous chemicals used in the manufacture of solar cells) and wind (slaughter of migratory birds) next.
I'll stop there before I go into full-bore rant mode and conclude by saying that if Yucca does go through, I'll bet there'll be an initial hysteria about it that'll cause property values near the site will drop. At that time I'll be giving serious thought to putting my money where my mouth is. A geek could do worse than to end up owning a ranch in Nevada with acres of land, beautiful mountain and desert scenery, no state taxes, and only a couple hours' drive to the wackiness that is Vegas.
Re:coal safer than nuke? (Score:4, Interesting)
Aug. 15, 1999. Myrna, Georgia (near Atlanta). At least that is the lastest one I know of.
I was almost killed in a coal boiler explosion in Tennessee in 1993, but that probably didn't "endanger" anyone outside the facility.
Most coal disasters are actually at the mines (methane or coal dust) not at the plants (coal dust or steam pressure). Of course, many people have their life expectancy reduced by polution from air and groundwater pollution that comes from using coal for power, but those deaths are spread out over distance and time so they seem less important.
For destructive potential to nearby residents it is hard to beat hydroelectric dams, though.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip14app.htm
http://www.msha.gov/S&HINFO/TECHRPT/FANDE/CDUST
http://www.msha.gov/S&HINFO/TECHRPT/P&T/COALDUS
Record so far (Re:coal safer than nuke?) (Score:3, Interesting)
Most fatalities from coal are not from power-plant accidents but from mining. Mining accidents mostly kill miners (who cares about them?), but also can kill many people who live near the mine. The 1972 flood at the Buffalo Creek Coal Mine [marshall.edu] in West Virginia killed 125 people living nearby, injured over 1000, and completely destroyed 500 homes.
Worldwide, tens of thousands of deaths per year occur from
Re:coal safer than nuke? (Score:3, Informative)
The daily death toll of coal is well known.
Re:FINALLY! (Score:3, Informative)
H H H H H H H H
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H-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-H
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H H H H H H H H
Re:Bubba Notices The Irony (Score:3, Interesting)
What does this have to do with a cleaner world? Crack water with electricity? Why would you need nuclear power plants to do that? (unless some of the people who gave you money during your election need some PR!) This is a non existant industry. GIVE the nuclear power industry ONE BILLION DOLLARS to do research?
The Bush administration and Senate Republicans want to give billions of taxpayer doll
Re:Bubba Notices The Irony (Score:3, Insightful)
The real solution, of course, is tort reform, to go to a loser pays system where foolish, ill-conceived lawsuits result in significant financial cost to those who insist on bringing them. But the trial lawyers would be starving in the streets and since
Re:Temporary ? (Score:5, Informative)
Until we get either some revolutionary new method of extracting the hydrogen (wasn't there a story here about some method involving a laser heating up a large tank of water on an artificial island and breaking up the water molecules?), or we get access to the atmospheres of planets like Jupiter which have many earth masses' worth of hydrogen, hydrogen remains a storage form, unusable as a source.
Daniel
Re:Temporary ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, what's worse, depending on foreign oil from the volatile middle east, or dealing with radioactive waste here in the states ? I'll bet Nevada isn't too happy about all this.
That would work just awesome, if it wasn't for thermodynamics. You see,
Re:Stupid people in charge!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to see your calculations on this. What are the kw/person rate you are using? What efficiency are you using for the technologies?
Re:Trot out the scary "Nuclear" word (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been near coal. I'd rather have the sneaky cancer of possible radiation leakage than the nasty lung cancer of coal. It's dirty, ugly, messy, and
Of course, solar cells cover hundreds of acres and don't do much; they generate tons of nasty by products for the silicon, and wind t
Re:Up and Atom ... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7018-8.cfm
h
Too many fast neutrons + too much unstable material = Criticality
Re:Up and Atom ... (Score:4, Informative)
Spot on the Planet
Chelyabinsk Nuclear Disasters
Plutonium and Tritium for Soviet nuclear weapons is produced at three closely guarded locations, each of which includes a "closed" city of workers. These cities do not appear on maps, and until recently, travel to and from them was all but prohibited. Even now, foreign visitors have been allowed to see only two of the sites. Each of the sites has an official name, often including a number that indicates a post office address, but each was known by another name or names abroad as well as in the Soviet Union.
The complex officially known as Chelyabinsk-40 is located in Chelyabinsk province, about 15 kilometers east of the city of Kyshtym on the east side of the southern Urals. It is situated in the area around Lake Kyzyltash, in the upper Techa River drainage basin among numerous other interconnected lakes. Between Lake Kyzyltash and Lake Irtyash is Chelyabinsk-65, the military-industrial city once called Beria, but today inhabitants call it Sorokovka("forties town").
Another Mayak laboratory, the All-Union Institute of Technical Physics, is located just east of the Urals, 20 kilometers north of Kasli. It is better known by its post office box, Chelyabinsk-70. It was opened in 1955, shortly after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opened in the United States.
Chelyabinsk-65, was reported to have 83,000 inhabitants and "almost 100,000 people." Chelyabinsk-40, the reactor complex, covers some 90 square kilometers, according to a recent ministry report, and is run by the production association Mayak("beacon" or "lighthouse"). All the reactors are located near the southeast shore of Lake Kyzyltash and relied on open-cycle cooling: water from the lake was pumped directly through the core.
Probably fashioned after the U.S. Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington, Chelyabinsk-40 was the first Soviet plutonium production complex. Construction was started on the first buildings of the new city in November 1945. Some 70,000 inmates from 12 labor camps were reportedly used to build the complex. It is here that the physicist Igor Kurchatov, working under Stalin's deputy Lavrenti Beria, built the first plutonium production reactor, called "Anotchka" or A Reactor, in just 18 months.
The people of the Chelyabinsk Region have suffered no less than three nuclear disasters:
For over six years, the Mayak complex systematically dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, the only source of water for the 24 villages which lined its banks. The four largest of those villages were never evacuated, and only recently have the authorities revealed to the population why they strung barbed wire along the banks of the river some 35 years ago. Today, as a result of Kyshtym-57's (a local environmental group lead by Louisa Korzhova) fight for radiation victims, a new law was introduced which allows residents of Muslyumovo to resettle themselves elsewhere. Unfortunately, the new law is limited only to one village.
In 1957, the area suffered its next calamity when the cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctioned and exploded. About two million curies spread throughout the region, exposing to radiation over a quarter million people. Less than half of one percent of these people were evacuated, and some of those only after years had passed.
The third disaster came ten years later. The Mayak complex had been using Lake Karachay as a dumping basin for its radioactive waste since 1951. In 1967, a drought reduced the water level of the lake, and gale-force winds spread the radioactive dust throughout twenty-five thousand square kilometers, further irradiating half a million people with five million curies.
Chelyabinsk-40, or the Kyshtym complex is best known to the outside world as the site of a disastrous explosion in 1957, only recently acknowledged by Soviet officialdom. The tanks were entirely immersed in, and cooled by, water. But the monitoring system was defective.
Batteries, really...Re:PV to Fuel Cells.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It takes a ton of energy to make the things.
Re:Bone-O-Rama (Score:3)
The energy giants have come on board with the idea of hydrogen being the common denominator with everything geared to consume it (or electricity made from it) and energy sources g
Re:yeah sure they will ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You want to do *what?* (Score:4, Informative)
Bottom line, a catastrophic coolant failure results in zero meltdown.