By now it should be painfully obvious to all that the scare generated by the anti-nuclear energy crowd has done a great disservice to this country and the global enviroment.
With no coal or oil deposits it her own, and concerned about energy dependency on foreign supplies, France opted for nuclear energy thirty years ago. The country currently operates fifty eight nuclear power plants. France has the cleanest air in Europe and the cheapest electricity rates - and even exports some to Germany and Britain. They have a giant facility on the Normandy coast that cools spent fuel rods and recyles them for use again.
Though there will always be the need to be on guard against malfunction and melt-down - staying on top of that engineering concern pales when compared against the massive environmental destruction created by burning fossil fuels and the ever-increasing brown-outs that are beginning to plague us. Energy demands will keep doubling more or less infinitely. Solar and wind can never be more than supplimental resources, and hydro is limited. Fighting wars just to keep oil flowing is bankrupting us and drilling for more has become a serious moral issue.
Its about time America moved out of the Iron Age and put its faith in the Nuclear Age.
Though I think we should definitely start investing more in nuclear power plants. Nuclear waste and what to do with it will always be a problem. The US has sold our waste to Russia, which I have read dumps it in Siberia in unsecure and in an environmentally unfreindly way. We have tried to dump the waste into mountains in Nevada, but many of the locals are saying NO and for good reason, because who knows what kinda accidents could result if the containment leaks into the groundwater supply.
So until we can figure out a better way of getting rid of the waste, nuclear power plants aren’t such a cut and dry solution to fossil fuels.
That is Siberia…I really hate to see good tundra go to waste because of nuclear contamination.
There are still nuclear power plants here in the US, as a matter of fact I saw one in Arkansas a few months ago on a road trip. At least, it looked a lot like a nuclear power plant.[/i]
Yeah well, the leakage from these sites have the potential to pollute ground water, and cause cancer rates to soar in the population surrounding the sites. Russia and China aren’t known for being environmentally friendly regimes.
Nuclear power is a risk we should fear for the simple fact that humans have screwed it up pretty bad a couple times. Likewise, alternative energy seems worse.
Unfortunately, economists avoid mentioning at almost every cost that there is not only an energy crisis toward its manufacture, but also toward its gluttony.
If we produce a cost-effective way to transport product into space (mechanical elevation, rather than rockets, for example) we might have a healthy and safe way to dispose of nuclear waste into our orbit. Or maybe we can dump it into our magma? It’s probably irrelevant, because nuclear fusion is probably going to supercede.
I don’t know why nuclear fusion is treated as such a cure-all for power. Aside from being twenty years from having a working fusion power plant for the past sixty years, a variety of myths have grown up around it – not the least being that it is non-polluting.
The waste from a fusion plant would be radioactive like the waste from a fission plant is. So, either way, if we move towards nuclear energy we will have to deal with the problem of disposal.
Now, personally, I think that nuclear power is a fair trade to make. Fossil fuels are incredibly toxic in the now, not just in terms of global climate change, but also in terms of global politics. Nuclear energy provides a partial solution to each of those problems.
The waste is incredibly toxic, but in a different way than fossil fuel waste is, so it allows us to address various environmental problems that we have caused (admittedly, by causing other environmental problems). It shifts the emphasis of the problem and hopefully it will give us time to shuffle our resources around so we can develop a sustainable system.
And the political problems of fossil fuels are all too obvious. Uranium, on the other hand, is readily available in the United States, Russia, and a variety of other, more politically stable areas.
Hey, it isn’t all wrong. The by-products of fusion are predicted to have half-lives on the order of decades, not centuries. So it is a much cleaner source of fuel. Just not totally clean.
But we will probably have to go to war for control of the moon once we get it working.
There is no need to concentrate critical masses of radioactive material and put them into an inherently unstable situation to generate electricity, no need at all.
IOne can respect the concern regarding the dangers of nuclear waste.
Our foundation has made a reasonable study on the pros and cons of nuclear energy use.
Our ranch is not far from the proposed Yucca Mountain storage site for all of America’s nuclear waste. I took the kids on a tour. There is no question in our minds that there will be no leakage in that site for hundreds of years to come.
The counter argument that it takes 40,000 years for radiation to exhaust itself and therefore no storage site is 100% safe is silly
Storage technology will continue to improve and we will be off nuclear energy within a few decades anyway.
In the meantime. nuclear energy is the cleanest source of mass energy we have. All the others added together cannot power the planet.
The final solution lies in tidal and wave energy and perhaps huge solar stations orbiting in near space. But that is a massive undertaking still decades ahead. In the meantime fossil fuel combustion is heating up the planet.
In the next two or three decades, before we tap into ocean energy, nuclear energy is by far the lesser of two evils.
The Sky’s in France are crystal clear. They run almost entirely on nuclear and have found ways to recycle much of the waste - with technology improving every year.
Sure an accidental melt-down can happen. But after Chernobyl, the safety standards have improved and all plants are on high alert.
So where are we? Do we all die now of global warming due to carbon emissions, or take the long term risk of nuclear?
Solar
Wind
Hydroelectric
Wave
Geothermal
Hydrogen Phosphates
Ethanol (possibly, don’t know enough about it)
There’s enough wind energy in the Dakotas alone to supply 20% of the US with power, or something like that.
Each renewable source has issues, but the first five can provide an enormous amount of power with no pollution (after, of course, the initial pollution caused by building them).
Personally, I want to see us harness lightning. That would be a feat.
SOLAR : I mentioned solar, but only from space. If you have $50,000:00 cash up front per home, go for it.
WIND: There are only a few spots with permanent wind. If we put mills out in the ocean in the 40 latitudes - okay
If we find a non-pollutant way to store energy from intermitant winds, Okay too. High speed carbon flywheels might do the job.
HYDRO-ELECTRIC . If we dam one more river I will scream.
HYDROGEN; I’ll buy that when the gas stations are installed at every corner.
ETHONOL. Nonesense! One study says it takes 1BTU of oil to produce 1.3 BTU of ethonol. Other studies say the reverse.
It would take 95% of USA farmland to fully supply us.
WAVE: I have already stated that Wave and Tidal are our best bet in the long term. But that requires massive infrastructuire on a scale that beats the pyramids and the Great wall combined. We must get there, but it will take decades. In the meanitiome (OTEC) Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion shows a little promise.
LIGHTENING: Interesting. We have some ideas on that.
ATOMOSPHERIC THERMAL ENERGY CONVERSION (ATEC) We have some ideas on that too.
HELIUM 3, mined on the moon is on the drawing boards.
I wasn’t saying any one of those was the solution, I was saying a combination can supply more than enough energy for the whole planet. It’s not economical, but the power is there. I also noted that they all have issues…damming, for example, is a huge strain on the local ecosystem. I understand that, but it’s not pollution in the same sense as car exhaust.
I also heard that particular problem with ethanol but didn’t know much about it; that’s why I put the note beside it. It may be a viable option in the future once the technology matures, I don’t know.
I see you didn’t touch geothermal.
And hydrogen phosphates are different than hydrogen powered cars, they’re literally clumps of energy sitting on the ocean floor.
