nuclear power

[COMMUNIST FLISK]

give me your opinions, NUCLEAR all the way for me

 

[ImprobableJoe]

It would work in a very strictly government-regulated society, where "free market" idiots aren't allowed to make any contributions, since they are a giant bundle of FAIL. In other words, it wouldn't work in the U.S. American companies don't care about cleaning up their non-nuclear pollution, or maintaining safe workplace standards, and the government has generally seen fit to let them get away with it. The answer to inefficient and corrupt corporations screwing up the economy and the energy policy is NOT to allow them to expand into nuclear power.

 

[Aught3]

Let's face it the planet is sick. It may not be our fault personally, but we have to fix it before we either destroy the planet with pollution or destroy each other as fossil fuels run out. Fission can be seen as a type of medicine for the planet, but it's nuclear medicine and there are some serious side effects. The main issue is the waste. Long after you and I are gone that stuff is still going to be a problem. By choosing fission we are leaving a mess for future societies to clean up, but it's better than leaving nothing at all.

My view is that fission is a stop gap, a temporary measure until we can get fusion online or renewable energy producing efficiently. So, my vote is for nuclear power but in moderation.

 

[Ozymandyus]

There are so many better sources than nuclear. If we really invested in geo-thermal and solar, I am fairly certain we could get a much better return per dollar than fission within a decade, with much less environment hazards.

Nuclear is no better than dirty coal in my opinion, and it has many harmful side problems besides its waste such as increase in weapons-grade fissile materials. Until we get a good clean fusion that has a strong return on energy invested working, which will be at least a decade away by most standards.

 

[irmerk]

My view is that fission is a stop gap, a temporary measure until we can get fusion online or renewable energy producing efficiently. So, my vote is for nuclear power but in moderation.

I agree with this conclusion.

I have written about alternative energy sources which can and should be invested in more and more in my blog. Also, my friend for one of his masters program classes in economics wrote a extensively long paper on nuclear power itself. I like to think I know a little bit, but I still do not know too much.

Now, taking what Ozymandyus has just said, I agree with him as well. I think nuclear is a good path as a midpoint between what we have currently and what we need to get to; an interlude. Still, by the time nuclear is invested in enough to perform anything as an intermission, other renewable energy sources could have been successful - had they been invested in firstly.

So, investing in better methods is a better idea. Biomass, geothermal, wind, hydro, solar and so on. However, nuclear is played out to be worse than it really is. A perfectly viable location to bury nuclear waste is in salt domes and caverns, as well as other places. So, I voted yes because nuclear is in all aspects better than oil. Not the best, but a better alternative.

 

[Ozymandyus]

I might overstate the danger of nuclear power, it mostly comes from anecdotes about a summer camp called Fort Scott where my elder two siblings went. It happened to be located near a nuclear enrichment facility (Fernald). Several kids in the area got cancer, and there were some other serious environmental issues... but most of all the camp was shut down before I got a chance to go. I'm still jealous of my other siblings and all their lucky exposure to radiation. Kidding.

But anyway, I admit this may make me biased, I just think its efficiency is overrated and our ability to tap into solar energy and other renewable resources have so much room for improvement and are clearly the future. I would rather sink all the money we might put into building a Nuclear plant that will be active in 10 years into making renewables affordable, like irmerk said.

 

[irmerk]

I might overstate the danger of nuclear power, it mostly comes from anecdotes about a summer camp called Fort Scott where my elder two siblings went. It happened to be located near a nuclear enrichment facility (Fernald). Several kids in the area got cancer, and there were some other serious environmental issues... but most of all the camp was shut down before I got a chance to go. I'm still jealous of my other siblings and all their lucky exposure to radiation. Kidding.

But anyway, I admit this may make me biased, I just think its efficiency is overrated and our ability to tap into solar energy and other renewable resources have so much room for improvement and are clearly the future. I would rather sink all the money we might put into building a Nuclear plant that will be active in 10 years into making renewables affordable, like irmerk said.

Exactly. This might be a rare case, which you speak of. Still, I would dare say it would be a better alternative to oil. But yes, investing in renewable energy sources is practical, achievable, and necessary.

 

[Josan]

I would say Fusion is the way to go, but seeing as it might take a while before we reach that, I would say tidal-power has a lot of unused potential.

 

[PuppetXeno]

I actually work in the nuclear branch, so allow me to share this information...

First off, in the western world, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is the leading authority when it comes to any business in the nuclear world. Their safety regulations are extremely tight, and any violation means your plant is going to shut down until the problems have been resolved, and if you can't, your plant is out of business. Nuclear facilities have to have extremely high standards of safety or they're out of business. There is no way to dodge their inspections, and trust me, they are *extremely thorough*.

I might overstate the danger of nuclear power, it mostly comes from anecdotes about a summer camp called Fort Scott where my elder two siblings went. It happened to be located near a nuclear enrichment facility (Fernald). Several kids in the area got cancer, and there were some other serious environmental issues... but most of all the camp was shut down before I got a chance to go. I'm still jealous of my other siblings and all their lucky exposure to radiation. Kidding.

I hope you're kidding about the whole anecdote, because kids getting cancer can in no way be related to direct radiation coming from the plant, or from radioactive contamination as a result of bad safety at that plant. More likely, if it's true, it has to be chemical contamination and even that is hard to imagine. Radiation intensity decreases with the square of the distance, so if children, being well outside the plant, were exposed to high enough levels for a significant chance of developing cancer, all the personnel inside the plant would have been irradiated to death in a few minutes time. Almost the same counts for the contamination. If children in the area end up with internal contamination in significant amounts for them to develop cancer, how about the personnel? How about the adults in the area? Or if it was a result of contamination in pregnant women, then it's still extremely far fetched.

Fission can be seen as a type of medicine for the planet, but it's nuclear medicine and there are some serious side effects. The main issue is the waste. Long after you and I are gone that stuff is still going to be a problem. By choosing fission we are leaving a mess for future societies to clean up, but it's better than leaving nothing at all.

My view is that fission is a stop gap, a temporary measure until we can get fusion online or renewable energy producing efficiently. So, my vote is for nuclear power but in moderation.

I also voted nuclear power in moderation, and it is an interlude while we're working on fusion technology (hopefully becoming available around 2050). However, current nuclear waste isn't a problem at all if you're handling it safely. I deal with it every day on the job. On annual basis, none of the personnel is being exposed to more than 150% of an average member of the population, and that is still less than 50% of what people in certain areas in Brazil or India are receiving from natural sources. The containers are designed to withstand impacts from a speeding train running into it, or a plane crashing on top of it. The eventual long term storage in caverns or salt mines is well out the way of doing harm. Radiation levels right on top of the long term storages containers are so low you can make your home there, sleep and eat everyday without having to fear for health problems.

Besides, 100 years of nuclear waste from a nuclear plant can be stored on an area the size of a football field, and that's just one level.

In the meantime, we're working on life-cycle innovation - re-irradiating waste to convert nuclides to nuclides with shorter decay times.

As for weapon grade uranium, the uranium used in nuclear plants isn't fit for that and still has to be enriched a good number of times before it becomes viable for that purpose. Our reactor used to run on highly enriched uranium, but under pressure of the US, who supplies us with our fuel, we had to convert to lower grade uranium or else they wouldn't take our used fuel rods back - this had to do with the non-proliferation treaty which virtually every country in the world has signed to.

All in all I wouldn't worry too much about corruption and free market failures because morons will simply not have a chance of starting a nuclear business. Not only is there too much tech involved, the global nuclear tech community has an eye of everything that happens - with the IAEA as watchdog. Anything out of order means you're out of business, period.

 

[luckyirish67]

I would say Fusion is the way to go, but seeing as it might take a while before we reach that, I would say tidal-power has a lot of unused potential.

The only problem with that is that so few areas have the tides change enough for tidal energy to be practical there. In America we only have one tidal energy plant.

 

[COMMUNIST FLISK]

In the meantime, we're working on life-cycle innovation - re-irradiating waste to convert nuclides to nuclides with shorter decay times.

im sure there is something like this in sellafield in the UK, converting nuclear waste into less stable isotopes so they decay quicker or something

 

[Mazzerkhan]

I think Nuclear power is a very emotive issue that people don't think through. I am pro-nuclear. For several reasons. Firsly any power stations currently built in the UK are 20 years old at the youngest. When you think of the deveolpements in both nuclear science and construction alone in the last 20 years it is easy to see how much better and safer any new power station would be. (are any of typing away on a 20 year old key board). People also fail to take into consideration just how regulated the day to day machinations of a NP station is. I work in pharma and people tend to switch between to two industries quite alot as the ways of working are so similar (ie you cant burp with out having it checked twice and countersigned by QA in blood). We all know that fossil fuels have perhaps 20 years of dominence left. yes there are risks associated with building these stations but we do have the technology and resources to maintain them.

 

[irmerk]

I actually work in the nuclear branch, so allow me to share this information... Anything out of order means you're out of business, period.

I concur with everything he said - I just did not have as much expertise, I guess. I would have to still disagree with PuppetXeno, though. I think renewable power, such as those I listed (Biomass, geothermal, wind, hydro, solar and so on.), are more long term intermediates to fusion as well as just long term solutions. If investment was put into those rather than nuclear power, they would last a lot longer and would still be useful when fusion is tapped into. Nuclear is a good option, but not as good as the other renewable sources.

 

[Ozymandyus]

Just to clear it up, I'm not claiming the kids got cancer from the plant by any means, thus an anecdote rather than a claim of causality. I believe that some people felt that the plant may have contributed, and there was some ground contamination around the closed plant where it was supposed the kids played at times.

But anyway, they did shut down the camp because of its proximity to the plant ( 2 miles! ), which was a true. I know that it was an over-reaction, but it still was an associated cost. And then hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on the clean up of the site over the next couple decades.

Anyway, as I said, this is a tiny way which one nuclear enrichment facility almost 50 miles from where I grew up affected my life, which I just thought I would share. I agree that its biased and unscientific, which is the context I brought it up in. But my point is you'll probably never get a story like that about solar cells, tidal power. Well maybe you would, what do I know.

Edit: I decided to look up some articles because my memory was a bit shoddy... apparently it had something to do with 3.1 million pounds of uranium dust that was unaccounted for from the facility, as well as quite a bit of radon and other pollutants. This was a plant that was operational between '51 and '87, so undoubtedly safety standards were a bit more lax then. Not sure how radioactive the dust was, probably not very.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

I think that Nuclear power will just patch things up, it won't fix thing in the long run per say.
But maximizing efficiency of our technology and abandon absolete technology can maintain the consumption low and avoid using large ammounts of energy at one time.

 

[PuppetXeno]

Edit: I decided to look up some articles because my memory was a bit shoddy... apparently it had something to do with 3.1 million pounds of uranium dust that was unaccounted for from the facility, as well as quite a bit of radon and other pollutants. This was a plant that was operational between '51 and '87, so undoubtedly safety standards were a bit more lax then. Not sure how radioactive the dust was, probably not very.

I looked into it, the culprit seems to be radon exposure. This article shows figures which I think are about right. All in all, the situation around the plant will lead / have lead to a (local) increase in lung cancer patients of about 3% above national average (incl. former personnel). And yes you won't find incidents like these with renewable energy sources...

Wiki article

Check out the wiki article; especially the World energy usage width graph, which shows the current market share % of various energy sources. We want to move away from fossile fuels, the biggest players at this point are Nuclear, Biomass and Hydro plants.

It only seems logical to expand the use of these three technologies, already in place and functioning, while ofcourse also investing in the smaller players. Time and cost efficiency will tell how technologies develope, and how the graph will look in 50 years.

 

[Finger]

Let's see what Bill Nye has to say.

 

[shanedk]

Nuclear FTW! It's safe, non-polluting, clean (even the "waste" wouldn't be a problem if government would get off their nuclear power = bombs kick and let them re-enrich it), and should last us a good long time.

BTW, my sister's a nuclear chemist and she and her husband both work at the local nuclear plant (I live within 2 miles as the crow flies), so I'm pretty up on what I'm talking about.

 

[patduckles]

i take it as read that by nuclear power you mean fission not fusion because fusion has not been perfected on a large scale.

i see it as a temporary fix until we can either perfect fusion or find more or better ways of harnessing gravitational, solar, wind, tidal, biomass, ect.

 

[hookah]

i see it as a temporary fix until we can either perfect fusion or find more or better ways of harnessing gravitational, solar, wind, tidal, biomass, ect.

agree.