Don't know much about nuclear power?

[NNadir]

You can learn all about it, and you should, since one of the greatest sources of fear is ignorance.

Here is a nice, very detailed, but clear and easily understood overview of the Susquehanna nuclear power station, not such a long drive from where I live.

http://www.pplweb.com/NR/rdonlyres/F63D7386-A57E-46C6-90A5-857D513B0254/0/seic_plantguide.pdf

Particularly instructive is the scale of the machine. The reactor's pressure vessel is about 350 square feet in area, about the size of a large living room, and 73 feet high.

Each reactor produces 11,741,000,000 BTU, 12 trillion joules, per hour, or 3,400 watts (thermal). this thermal power is converted 1100 watts of electricity, meaning that the reactor's thermal efficiency is about 32%. The plant puts out about 53 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per day. Thus this one plant matches, in about 10 days, the entire solar PV energy output of the United States as recorded in 2005. (In 2004, slightly more solar electricity was produced than in 2005.)

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epmxlfile1_1_a.xls

(Some people want you to believe that solar power, an intermittent power source, could replace all of the world's nuclear stations - these people have a very weak appreciation of a silly science called "physics" - but you're smarter than they are.)

The turbines produce electricity at 24,000 volts which is transformed at one unit to 500,000 volts for shipment and at the other to 230,000 volts. It is stepped down before it gets to my house.

The reactor complex employs about 1,000 people.

[Massacure]

1. I just trolled my bookmarks and want to add in another great website

Its a website that has a research paper by Bernard Cohen, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. It is very long, but detailed and fairly easy to follow. Reading these kind of things is what I do when I'm bored over summer break. :rofl:

edit: Oops, I forgot the link.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/index.html

[baldguy]

2. And 18 lbs of spent nuclear fuel per person.

We could put it in the basement, or bury it in the back yard. Or collect it all and put it a big hole in the ground in Nevada.

Or we could make it into bullets and shoot them at our enemies.

[phantom power]

4. Or we could recycle it and get lots more energy from it.

[NNadir]

5. First of all, your number is wrong; even if it were accurate it'd be...

silly.

There will be, in a few years, about 75,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, 95% of which will be unchanged uranium that can be recycled. This will be the total amount of fuel accumulated for 60 years of all of the commercial nuclear power ever produced in the United States.

http://energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&PressRelease_id=235059&Month=8&Year=2006

There are 300 million people in the United States. Thus, by simple division, the quantity of waste produced is about 250 grams per person, accumulated over 60 years.

If you don't know what you're talking about, make stuff up.

If we note that 95% of the material is recoverable - and should be recovered for reuse - the amount of material left over will be about 12 grams.

Like most people who raise this non-issue of so called nuclear waste, you are unable to produce a single case of a person who has been injured by so called "nuclear waste." Nor do you note what the per capita output of the most dangerous waste known - that would be carbon dioxide - is per year.

The figure for per capita carbon dioxide emissions is 16 tons per person per year. http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1cco2.xls

Because you're indifferent to this waste, carbon dioxide, only one of the myriad wastes produced by fossil fuels - and only one of which is dumped into the air and water - doesn't mean it is harmless or that I buy into the validity of your highly selective attention. I don't. Ignorance - especially deliberate ignorance about the fact that all forms of energy produce waste - kills. That's the point.

It is obviously much easier to contain 0.012 grams of solid material accumulated every 60 years than it is to contain 16 metric tons of a gas produced in 1/60 th the time.

[MercutioATC]

3. The difference between nuclear power and fossil fuel power.

When a fossil fuel power plant in Russia has a catastrophic failure, people in Sweden don't have to stop eating vegetables.


Of course, there's the small issue of disposing of nuclear waste, too...

[NNadir]

6. But they do have to stop eating fish.

Maybe you haven't heard about mercury contamination.

Maybe you pretend that the warnings to pregnant women about tuna fish are trivial.

Oh, but I get it, I really do. The coal plants are not having catastrophic failures when they poison most of the fish on earth, and most of the vegetables. They are operating normally.

I suppose too, that the changes to our climate related to the normal operations of coal plants are in your view harmless. Am I on the right track there?

[MercutioATC]

7. Yes, there IS that...

Look, I'm not touting the advantages of fossil fuel plants. They're a real problem.

I'm simply not willing to support a power source that creates even bigger problems (IMO). Nuclear power is MORE dangerous in the event of a catastrophic failure. That's the small issue. Nuclear power creates waste that is dangerous for millions of years and we have no idea what to do with it. That's the big issue.

Can solar, water, and wind power in their current technological states replake the KWH generated by nuclear power plants? No.

Do they have the potential to do so in the near future if we continue to work toward their advancement? I believe so.

Nuclear power, like fossil fuel power, is dirty. I believe that we should spend our efforts to develop more efficient renewable power sources than invest in the sham that is "clean" nuclear power.

[NNadir]

8. You believe?

It is your opinion then that there are risk free forms of energy?

Recently I have been writing about the ignored Banqiao dam failure that killed a quarter of a million people in 1975.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Would hydroelectricity be one of the risk free clean renewable energy systems that you favor? Do you have any concept of what the potential scale of such systems is?

What is the risk in your belief system, of the long promised renewable energy technologies being unable to deliver? You do recognize that renewable energy was once nearly 100% of the energy on earth, do you not? Have you looked into why it no longer represents a fraction anywhere near that?

In my journal I have calculated that in percentage terms, the renewable portion of US energy demand is decreasing slightly? So you'll be OK if we continue to poison fish until we can figure out a way to reverse that trend? You're OK with rising seas, droughts, powerful storms?

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/NNadir/19

Have you systematically analyzed the external cost of energy to determine what the cost of the status quo is?

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/NNadir/19

You seem to think the whole thing is a lark and that no rational decisions are involved.

Just as you seem to not have thought through the matter of mercury contamination, you have not thought through the issue of energy.

Here are some of the facts I often repeat: There is no form of risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

The Susquehanna nuclear station works. It produces very little greenhouse gas, almost no air pollution, and all of the spent fuel can be contained in a few small containers. It doesn't get any better than that.

[Viking12]

9. More false dichotomies and personal attacks...

do you ever debate without resorting to Limbaugh-like tactics?

[hunter]

10. NNadir is fairly correct in his science.

But he consistently overestimates human rationality.

Most of us have to be smacked in the head with great honking big sticks before we realize we must change our ways.

Oh, shit, New Orleans is under water, and Holly Beach is gone...

No, we still don't get it, but after a few more cities go under we will.

[dcfirefighter]

11. Explain the False Dichotomy.

As I read it, NNader claims that coal power cannot be replaced with wind & solar, mostly due to the intermittant nature of wind and solar generation:

Solar power only captures sunlight during the day, it's ability is reduced by weather. It may store thermal energy for generation at night, but any energy stored during the day cannot be used during the day. As it stands, most solar generators produce, on the average, 1/4 to 1/3 of their rated peak capacity. Conveniently, solar tends to work best at those times when electricity demand is the greatest - when the sun is shining and people are using their air conditioning. Solar power is currently great for remote generation, rather than expanding the electrical grid.

Wind power only works when the wind is blowing. Wind power is cheap, and great if you can generate it when and where you need it. Unfortunately, the wind tends to blow constantly only offshore and in mountain passes, not necessarily where people live. Wind also tends to blow the most in the spring and fall, when energy demand is the lowest.

A switch to either or both sources would require a hefty additional investment - some means would have to be built to store power such that it could be offered constantly.

In economic and moral terms, that is, measured in dollars, lives, and environmental costs, nuclear is the cheapest continuously available form of power generation. Wind is the cheapest intermittant form of power generation.

The only cheaper form of 'energy' is conserved energy. However, conservation cannot account for the amount of energy currently generated from fossil fuels. Conservation will also generally require higher energy costs - something I am not afraid of, but is generally politically untenable from both sides of the aisle. While economists generally agree that a carbon tax would solve many of our problems, it would have the effect of raising consumer prices (and making nuclear, wind, and solar more competitive). As such, few politicians will risk being the guy who raised energy prices.

I support a carbon tax with the revenue being shared equally among all - therefore the poor get back more than they put in, yet still have the economic incentive to avoid & reduce energy use.

[NNadir]

12. I want to emphasize your statement, which I sometimes under represent,

"The only cheaper form of 'energy' is conserved energy."

This is absolutely true. I hope that nothing I say in favor of nuclear energy will ever been construed as denying this. I do note that like everything, the distribution of energy worldwide is unjust and unfair. Much of the noise made about China is simply a result of the Chinese claiming a right to live as well as Westerners have been doing for a century.

We should at the very least do our best to assure that any equipment that replaces old equipment be as efficient as possible.

We can get an idea about some recoverable energy - and the scale of what we can do through conservation - when we look at the energy flow chart.



We see that the 22.4 exajoules of waste heat from the transportation wasted - automotive heaters aside - is probably not recoverable. Most of that goes out through automotive and truck radiators. But there are 27.8 exajoules of heat rejected to the atmosphere from electrical energy production. Some of that is recoverable. We should all support co-generation wherever it is possible. That is an excellent conservation strategy.

It should be possible to use (recycle) some of that heat to provide some of the 20.1 exajoules of industrial energy that appears on the chart. Obviously we would like to use that heat to get at the 2.3 exajoules of coal used in industry and the 8.2 exajoules of natural gas. It is probably the case that the 0.7 exajoules of biomass is from the wood and pulp industry, and of course, nobody objects to this fraction which should, by all means, either stay in place or be enlarged.

You have not misconstrued by views in any way.

As always, in noting that the contribution of solar energy is largely trivial, I do not wish to claim that I oppose solar energy. I am for it, wherever conditions allow it to be used. However, given that it represents, even at this late date, a tiny fraction of our energy supply - the smallest of the already small renewable portion - I find claims that it can replace fully and in a timely fashion intermittent fossil fuels like natural gas questionable. The notion that it can replace either coal or nuclear is simply patent nonsense. If it could have done so, it would have done so, a long time ago. People have been cheering it on for decades.

I think that wind power should be encouraged wherever it can be built, but especially where there is existing gas capacity that it can cause to be shut down when the wind is blowing. One excellent way to store wind energy that is not too expensive and has been industrially proved is through the use of pumped storage. This should allow wind to help contribute more than it might otherwise. Wind is turning into a renewable success story, and it's a bright spot on the horizon. I very much doubt that we're going to see anything like the Banqiao disaster with wind. But as things stand now, wind is not enough, not by a long shot.

I hate to talk about lab scale systems, because it always invites magical thinking, but I think the reversible fuel cell - I am speaking of cells that electrochemically reduce carbon dioxide and water to methanol - may make the possibility of storing renewable energy practical in the future, if there is a future. This is different than an ordinary battery, since the electricity is stored as an easy to ship liquid fuel that can accumulate in any quantity. To reduce toxicity issues, I would favor the conversion of methanol to DME, which is the most versatile and least toxic fluid fuel known. This would go a long way to improving the prospects of wind power in particular. Under these circumstances it may be possible to power transportation devices - any devices at all in fact - with wind. The environmental cost that such an industry might entail is, of course, unknown.

As I always say, I will be happy to debate the relative merits of various forms of energy that have replaced fossil fuels after fossil fuels have been replaced.

Let me also add my hearty concurrence with your view of a carbon tax. I support that fully. I think it is essential. The fact that it is politically unfeasible is a measure of the poor thinking on the part of the public.

Personally I think the real outcome of all of this is going to be massive tragedy. I am less and less confident that there is going to be a soft landing on this matter. I think time is up. More and more I'm depressed, massively depressed, by what I see, which is largely a triumph of ignorance.

[Viking12]

13. If you're not a nuclear whore you're for coal...

NNader claims that coal power cannot be replaced with wind & solar

"Claims" is the key term here. The reasoning used to get to that claim is specious at best.

[jpak]

15. and original thinking is also impressive

:)

[jpak]

14. On Utsira Island (Norway) they produce wind generated electricity 24/7/365

using a UPS system, hydrogen electrolysis and fuel cells.

Denmark uses Norwegian hydropower to balance its wind power loads.

Copenhagen (a large city in Denmark) has a 570 MWe biomass power plant that supplies most of the city's district heating and electricty.

Humboldt University has a PV H2 fuel cell system that produced power 24/7365 for seven years without human intervention - no nuclear power plant could EVER match that performance.

Multi-MW scale electrolysis and H2 fuel cell systems are in commercial operation today.

And you don't necessarily need exotic tech to deal with intermittent loads from wind or solar (although Beacon flywheel systems can do that at multi-MW scales today).

Biomass plants can produce base-load power or at night and balance diurnal loads from PV or solar thermal electric facilities.

Biogas plants can produce power on demand to handle night time peak and intermediate loads.

Even smaller run-of-river hydro plants in Maine have enough ponding capacity to increase power production at night or when needed.

The notion that renewables can't do it all is just plain wrong.

And - if nuclear was so goddamned cheap, US utilities would not have canceled 110 reactors since 1973 (at a cost to ratepayers of $112 billion) and they would be building them today.

And they surely would not need $12 billion in Dick Cheney subsidies to build 6 new nuclear plants - including a 1.8 cent per kWh production credit (taxpayers paying nuclear plant operators to sell them electricity??? Say it ain't so).

And they could kick in the extra $30 billion needed to complete Yucca Mountain (taxpayers are picking that up now).

And how much will the American economy suffer after ChimpCo takes out Iran's "peaceful" uranium enrichment facilities (billions).

When we ignore the ignorance, thinking people can only conclude that nuclear power sucks ass...

:evilgrin:

[jpak]

16. In Germany, the nuclear industry employs ~30,000 people

whereas Germany's renewable energy industry employs 300,000 people.

Renewables produce clean low-carbon energy and...

JOBS

JOBS

JOBS

And the engineers that design and produce PV modules, solar electric power systems, wind and tidal turbines, biomass and biogas power systems don't know no fissiks, by-ol-o-gee and kemistree????

Really????

But, oh, I forget - they only believe in mysticism and magic ...

What horseshit.

[dcfirefighter]

17. Yes, and if we banned bulldozers, dump trucks, and cranes

the construction industry would emply 20 times the number of people it does.

[NNadir]

18. I saw this in India.

I was in India for about 3 weeks, and the whole time I saw not a single cement truck, although I visited a lot of places under construction.

It was, frankly, eerie. It will stick in my mind until I die.

In India - at least what I saw of India, mostly Mumbai and Hydrabad - the role of cement trucks is filled by people with buckets. A cement truck costs more than $100,000, whereas you can pay 200 people a dollar a day to mix cement and haul it in buckets. Moreover you can define your own working conditions.

This is, of course, renewable energy.

If the cement-truck-replacing-people die from overwork, or exposure, it seems relatively easy to replace them. There are huge deposits of poor people that can be easily mined. This is a wonderful scheme for making people useful.

[jpak]

19. The same thing occurs at Indian nucular plants

When radioactive boo-boos happen (and they do - a lot), the plant managers send in armies of low-skilled labor to take care of the problem...the so-called Glow Slaves .

This has nothing to do with Evil Renewable Energy BTW.

Hey, maybe we can burn some of those straw-men to keep warm this winter!

[dcfirefighter]

20. straw men

You brought up employment numbers. They're irrelevant. Taking 6 people to do the job of 3 improves no one's life.

[IrateCitizen]

21. Do we want to discuss quantity, or quality?

One of the things inherent in the renewable industry that jpak talks about, and the jobs it creates, is that many of these jobs provide meaningful work for those involved. The human cement trucks of which NNadir and you speak are quite different, in that they are unskilled labor that has little to do with human needs.

Now, I know that NNadir has stated that energy challenges are only concerned with physics and science, and have absolutely nothing to do with social science or philosophy -- so this point may well be lost on him. But one of the major advantages of increased employment through the renewables industry is that it provides people with the opportunity to be engaged in meaningful tasks, the kind of labor that helps us to each affirm our individual and collective identity as humans rather than as mindless cogs in some vast industrial machine.

In his landmark book Democracy and Education, John Dewey stated that people want to be engaged in "cooperative doings with others." This observation has as much to do with the idea of work as it does with education. In fact, however misguided his conclusions may have been, it was what lay at the heart of Marx's critiques of industrialized capitalism. Marx spent his time not among the "proletariat" he came to champion in his political philosophy, but among the artisans who were being squeezed out by the process of industrialization and assembly-line production. Where Marx went wrong was that he embraced the most influential idea of the Enlightenment in advancing his political theories -- the idea of empiricism -- when the problem he was trying to address was one of quality and humanity.

See, it was the concept of meaningful work that gave us structures that provided aesthetic enjoyment as well as utility. A large part of this conjunction was the idea that work was something that had meaning, that had quality. Contrast this with our modern cities of skyscrapers, where the buildings themselves are meant not to strike a sense of aesthetic awe, but to completely dwarf people as to make them feel insignificant in a rather soulless way.

This is one of the biggest problems I have with the "business-as-usual" subset of the crowd that recognizes energy crises. My observations have led me to believe that one of the major roots of our problems AND attendant discontent is that we have effectively removed ourselves from most everything that defines us as human, and then applied the false label of "improving life" to all of this removal. There is a big difference between the concepts of "standard of living" and "quality of life". Meaningful work -- even if it is something less "efficient" -- is a significant tool toward improving the latter.

[NNadir]

22. We may well ask who will find mass grave digging "meaningful work."

People always want to present the case that someone who argues for nuclear energy is necessarily arguing against people working in the renewables energy industry. That is not the case. If people want "meaningful work" in the renewables industry they are free to enter it.

Here is a problem though: Right now renewable energy is expensive. Thus people who want meaningful work in the renewables industry will need to work for wealthy people. Everyone wants renewable energy to produce more. Everyone wants it to be bigger. But it is still trivial. And that has to do with productivity mostly. So in fact, access to renewable energy is basically meaningful for rich people.

But nobody who is for nuclear energy is against renewable energy. On the contrary, almost all of us are concerned mostly about fossil fuels and I cannot think of a single person who supports nuclear energy who proposes it as an alternative to renewable energy. Almost everyone looks at nuclear energy for what it is: An alternative, the only alternative in most places, to coal.

The problem is that there are some renewable advocates - a subset - who think that renewable energy should be about attacking the least dangerous of the grand scale fuels - nuclear energy. They are nuts. They are unethical. They are criminally insane.

I may sound often as if I am against renewable energy - because I point out its limitations and the realities of the matter using data and comparing that data with historical predictions. If 800,000,000 people wish to be usefully employed making windmills, I have no objection. But I don't think that such a state of affairs is realistic, nor, do I believe an infinite number of windmills is actually going to make our energy problems and environmental problems go away.

When Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States, the population of the United States was somewhere around 5 or 6 million people. These people had access to vast resources, that were largely untapped. http://members.aol.com/ntgen/hrtg/census.html

John Dewey died just before I was born, when the population of the world was just a little more than a third of what it is now.

I am, as usual, annoyed that people seem to wish to attach all kinds of social ideals, from socialism, the the soulfulness of meaningful work, to public happiness to energy. Let me tell you something. In the 1930's, when the Hoover dam was being built, long lines of unemployed people waiting for someone who had a job to die in an industrial accident, so they could have a job. The Hoover dam was not about satisfied meaningful work. It was about work period.

So it is in India.

We would all like to be interconnected and to laze around thinking about the meanings of our life. But there are, like it or not and whatever the causes, 6.5 billion people on the planet. We can, of course, choose to elevate the "meaningful" nature of maybe 1 billion of them, if we let the other 5.5 billion die horrible deaths. Or we can try to be efficient.

I have long argued that the ethical way to get our population under control is to provide a decent standard of living through the exercise of liberal principles: Access to decent food, health care, respect for the rights of women, provision of educational opportunity...

In the west, where access to these conditions is broad, the populations are stable and in some cases, not allowing for immigration, actually falling.

To provide these things we need energy. What's more it must be clean energy provided in a reliable means that is available in massive amounts, at least until we can get the population reduced so that it is consistent with the carrying capacity of the earth.

I believe that the opportunity for ethical population reduction has probably already passed. Much of what has been done is now irreversible. Thus my prediction is that in effect, we have already acted in such a way as to make the very lives of billions of people improbable for the long term. I contend that this is an emergency. The people on the Titanic were not thinking about whether it was more meaningful to swim with graceful breaststrokes or to row. The were all hoping to row. Those who didn't get to row, died.

Like the people on the Titanic, we're about to see a lot of dead people, far more than they saw. I can tell you that in the lead up to these deaths, there isn't going to be a lot of abstractions about the soulessness of architecture or Jeffersonian principles. There's going to be terror, not necessarily the kind that comes with terrorism.

If we're going to talk about meaningful work, we don't have to attach the issue to issues of energy. Unless we solve the matter of energy - and do it quickly - there's going to be very little room to do anything at all.

If we must find meaningful work offering feelings of community there are lots of less dangerous ways to make such work. We can go with Ghandi and have everyone spin their own cloth, or march to the sea to collect salt, or plow their fields with hand plows and horses or oxen, or labor in the fields picking cotton or whatever. People can weave, or make pottery, or whatever. They can become organic farmers. Or musicians. They can run tours for high school kids to antarctica via sailboat.

Now, it happens that some nuclear engineers find their work meaningful. Some of them have labored their whole lives just to get into nuclear engineering programs. If you look on the right of this link, you see just such a lovely young woman, Lisa Stiles-Shell, who definitely feels she's doing something meaningful: http://web.mit.edu/nse/ In fact, she is connected with other young people all over the world, all of whom are trying their best to work for the good of the human race.

[dcfirefighter]

23. Define 'meaningful work'

you can't. It's in the eye of the beholder.

Many people consider repairing things as 'meaningful work'. Should we then design things to fail, such that more people can find 'meaningful work'?

The only option in letting each potential worker self-define 'meaningful work' is to ensure a high demand for labor. No doubt you agree with the benefits of a high demand for labor. If demand for labor is high, laborers can find the niche that most fits their desires, abilities, and needs.

In another post, I listed the benefits of placing dinosaur work with people work, that is that energy from coal, oil, and gas is mostly due to the embodied energy removed from natural sources. Fuel costs are the major portion of operating a fossil-fuel power plant.

Energy from wind, solar, and even nuclear power are almost completely due to work done by humans. Uranium costs are a tiny fraction of nuclear power costs. Ideally, acquiring the use of windy sites is a tiny fraction of wind power costs.

More people earning more money and spending it generally benefits the bulk of society. Similarly, if the proportion of money spent shifts from spending on fossil-fuels (or any of a number of other natural resources) to spending on labor-made products, the bulk of society benefits.

Think for a moment of the things we spend money on that are not the product of labor.
Each one of these things siphons off wealth that could benefit the labor class - which includes all of us who earn a living through our work, either with our hands or with our minds.

Some things that come to my mind: Oil, Gas, Coal, Windy Sites, Sunny Sites, Rural Sites, Urban Sites, Suburban Sites, Shorefront Sites, Water, Certain Licenses, Most Taxes (except those on pollution and the 'ownership' of this list of natural resources)