Nuclear Energy

I'm all for it

Nuclear is good clean energy, except the waste, if we could just find a way to make the waste benign.

We are getting them cleaner all the time.
Its been years (decades?) sence we have built any new ones.
The chinese I hear have some clean new designs.
A damn sight better then coal burning plants, IMO.

Gotta agree! We need more Nuclear power and we need to make nuclear storage NOW!! Plenty of places in the Movahe for it..

Plus Fussion is only maybe 20 years out maybe less if we get our shit together.

Nuclear energy is the key to space exploration, not to mention countless other things.

Though I don't think we will utilize it unless it becomes extremely profitable for select individuals. Unless somebody can make a killing off exploiting every single aspect of it, it wont get off the ground. It's sad that that's the way our system works...

Cheap, Abundant, Cleaner (as Clean is a misnomer)

Though compared to any other power source Nuclear is probably the Cleanest. Solar will require littering our landscape with solar panels, and wind with wind mills, and both of those require special locations to build them.

Tidal power requires bays, harbors and inlets with strong tidal action, and once again litters areas with junk.

No, ultimately it is better to find a mountain in an unpopulated area for the radioactive waste and bury it, and use nuclear energy.

Environmentalists strike me as odd in their hatred of nuclear energy when Solar and Wind make the landscape look so much more disgusting imo.

TheBrutalTruth said:

Cheap, Abundant, Cleaner (as Clean is a misnomer)

Though compared to any other power source Nuclear is probably the Cleanest. Solar will require littering our landscape with solar panels, and wind with wind mills, and both of those require special locations to build them.

Tidal power requires bays, harbors and inlets with strong tidal action, and once again litters areas with junk.

No, ultimately it is better to find a mountain in an unpopulated area for the radioactive waste and bury it, and use nuclear energy.

Environmentalists strike me as odd in their hatred of nuclear energy when Solar and Wind make the landscape look so much more disgusting imo.

Click to expand...

I guess I'd consider myself an environmentalist in the sense that I think it's important to protect the environment. But I also think we should be utilizing every single option available, solar, wind, wave, geo-thermal, nuclear, anything that produces energy. But you have to find a balance, an equalibrium for nature. If we somehow worked out all the kinks in each of these technologies but put the environment in danger while doing it, that would just create new problems in the future.

I don't care what the landscape looks like, what it looks like isn't really that important. I forgot where I heard this but if they placed a ton of solar panels in the mojave desert and out near Vegas, I think the size was pretty big, somewhere near 100 sq miles, it could produce a substantial amount of electricity. In that scenario I think the right move would be to use the solar panels as it's not critically damaging to the environment.

The shit we need to get past is oil and coal, both of those are becoming obsolete and both are huge contributors to greenhouse gases, disregarding the rest of the bullshit that's been discussed on this forum about oil and how many greedy bastards control it's profits. There's no such thing as clean coal technology.

Not to mention the foreign policy aspect of buying all are energy

I'm amazed at the pro nuke sentiment I'm seeing here, pleasantly amazed. There already is some very good 'new' nuclear technology that is begging to be deployed. There is a technology called 'molten salt' which is a huge jump over the existing light water reactors.

The wild thing, is this 'new' technology was developed and a pilot reactor operated in the 1960's. Burns the nuclear fuel way down to the equivalent of nuclear ash. And much safer to boot. I'll bore anyone with details if you're baked enough for such a thing.

growone said:

I'm amazed at the pro nuke sentiment I'm seeing here, pleasantly amazed. There already is some very good 'new' nuclear technology that is begging to be deployed. There is a technology called 'molten salt' which is a huge jump over the existing light water reactors.

The wild thing, is this 'new' technology was developed and a pilot reactor operated in the 1960's. Burns the nuclear fuel way down to the equivalent of nuclear ash. And much safer to boot. I'll bore anyone with details if you're baked enough for such a thing.

Click to expand...

I think everyone's eyes have been opened to the "harmlessness" of petrolium and the "horrors" of Nuclear power...

Good point. Everyone is kind of moving target, but I think we're getting closer. Nuke has issues, most energy sources do. But when you take a step back, and look at the risks and the benefits, nuke has some very attractive features.

I really hate being the alarmist type, but there are times when it is right to yell 'fire'. World populations have gotten to their size with cheap energy. I really fear if we don't go nuke, well, the shit we see now is going to get worse, much worse.

yup, and I think everyone knows it..

I heard that the State of North Dakota has enough wind power potential to provide 3X what the US uses now. I say build all of em there, who the hell cares does anyone even live there? I drove through once on my way To Seattle and saw nothing but grass. I'm not even sure if they drive cars there yet, they are a bit behind the times I think.

NIMBY

i'm all for solar energy

A combination of higher efficiency and using multiple technologies will need to happen soon as Oil is an eventual dead end being a finite resource. Control of oil resources has become the major trigger point in the world too, not good. Decentralized energy production (moving away from oil and coal) may have a rather large side benefit of helping to bring about world peace...kind of sad really that as a world population we've collectively spent so much on things that can kill people rather than on clean energy production. It's almost like the big companies don't want other technologies...hmmm.

Littering the landscape is something that's interesting, we've gotten so used to all the things that already exist. For instance, telephone poles and wires are omnipresent, yet we barely notice them. I wouldn't mind seeing more alternative energy devices on the landscape if it helps to decentralize energy production and reduce reliance on oil. Think of how dependent this country is on oil, it's scary what would happen if the supply chain is interrupted even for a short time.
Call me evil but it might be a good wake up call to a complacent American public trained to wait for somebody else to fix the problem all the while using far more energy than other people in the world.

I'm on the fence with Nuclear, I don't like the idea of creating and storing waste. My personal preference is conservation and a simpler life style, plus the sun's rays aren't taxed yet.

I'm all in favor of nuclear as a stopgap measure. Hell; France, fucking France, the home of Greenpeace, uses nuclear power for 80% of it's electrical generation. We have the technology and we have the technicians (Thank you U.S. Navy!). But do we have the political will?

The irony of the Three Mile Island situation is that it caused a knee-jerk reaction against nuclear technology in spite of the fact that every safety measure that was designed to operate in an emergency did so flawlessly. The situation was completely contained. Plus, the anti-nuclear flames were fanned by a little motion picture called The China Syndrome (Thank you again, Jane Fonda!).

Unfortunately, Chernobyl took place several years later. A situation where everything went wrong, disastrously wrong.

I mention it as a stopgap measure because at our current levels of energy usage and factoring in future use, we would only have about 20 years worth of the base components required to generate nuclear energy.

NoDrama said:

I heard that the State of North Dakota has enough wind power potential to provide 3X what the US uses now. I say build all of em there, who the hell cares does anyone even live there? I drove through once on my way To Seattle and saw nothing but grass. I'm not even sure if they drive cars there yet, they are a bit behind the times I think.

Click to expand...

I got a better idea, level California and build them all there...

That's an often quoted number and it's partly true. True if we stay with light water reactors and don't reprocess the fuel. Light water is incredibly inefficient, at least with respect going through the full nuclear fuel cycle, about 1%. Better tech that's around get's you to 2%.

Fast neutron(molten salt is one example), gets about 98% of the energy of the fuel load. The low number of year quote mostly comes from proven fissionable reserves. That's mainly because there has been little incentive to increase proven reserves due to the low price.

Conservative estimates of likely reserves with efficient reactors go out into millions of years of energy generation. Not sure about that, but the total energy is potentially vast. This is not a number made up by myself, there are some very credible people(USA national labs mostly) who have investigated this path.