Best energy alternatives to stop global warming

[jwenting]

Uranium 238 is not fissile, but it can be transformed into plutonium, which is fissile. The thing with that picture is that there is no use to recycle U238 without breeder reactor to burn it, and nearly all of those U235 is already been burned. If only we have more research on breeder reactors we can solve this problem, burning all those spent fuel

we don't need more research on breeders, we know how to build and operate them.

If it weren't for the idiots in the greeny and communist/anti-nuclear (and yes they're all the same people) lobbies we'd be operating them right now.

Of course the entire "global warming" thing itself is the biggest load of crap out there. There's no such thing, at least not as portrayed by the greenie movement.

There's natural cycles, which won't be changed by the fact that you're driving a Prius rather than a Landcruiser and living in an unheated shack burning manure to make a tiny little illegal fire to heat some porridge over rather than in a comfortable house connected to the national grid where you have central heating, a fridge filled with stuff from the supermarket, and a nice oven to make tasty meals out of that.

[m4v]

we don't need more research on breeders, we know how to build and operate them.

If it weren't for the idiots in the greeny and communist/anti-nuclear (and yes they're all the same people) lobbies we'd be operating them right now.

Of course the entire "global warming" thing itself is the biggest load of crap out there. There's no such thing, at least not as portrayed by the greenie movement.

There's natural cycles, which won't be changed by the fact that you're driving a Prius rather than a Landcruiser and living in an unheated shack burning manure to make a tiny little illegal fire to heat some porridge over rather than in a comfortable house connected to the national grid where you have central heating, a fridge filled with stuff from the supermarket, and a nice oven to make tasty meals out of that.

We don't have breeder reactors because they're more expensive than conventional ones, and because they pose proliferation risks. But whatever, you can't expect a global warming naysayer to get his facts right.

Edited June 15, 2014 by m4v

[phoenix_ca]

I'm not talking about extraction from spent fuel. CANDU's calandria refueling system enables you to put whatever you want inside while the thing is working. That way, you can get your matter of choice irradiated in the intense neutron flux. This is exactly how RBMK produced plutonium.

Yes, there are more efficient ways to do it, but this is way more easier than messing with spent LWR fuel.

Except the CANDU design is very sensitive to fuel balancing. I've never seen any credible evidence that trying to stick any old fissile material in one of the fuel tubes would even work; in fact everything I've read on them suggests the opposite. It's more likely that it'd prevent itself and the surrounding fuel from reaching criticality. The CANDU design has very little in the way of excess reactivity.

http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/Whitlock_IAEA_conf_Oct_2009.pdf

Because of these features (low excess reactivity and constraints of fuelling machine operation), it is not credible that a CANDU reactor core could be operated for significant durations at low core burnup for the purpose of high-purity fissile plutonium production. The fuelling machines are not capable of the sustained duty cycle this would require and hence the reactor would not be able to maintain safety margins, nor remain critical.

The CANDU core as a whole is sensitive to fuel management decisions, and regional reactivity must be monitored and balanced as an integral part of steady-state operation. The flux throughout the core is measured with an array of in-core flux detectors, and this information would clearly indicate any deviations in fuel management from nominal operation. As this information is available to the IAEA for verification of declared operation parameters, this provides an additional level of oversight of the operation of CANDU, and confidence that it is being operated within its design envelope.

This also affects the capability for rapid refuelling of selected channels, but also the capability to maintain regional overpower margins, and ultimately core reactivity. Thus the inherently low excess reactivity of the CANDU core, the highly complex and mission-oriented nature of the fuelling machines designed to maintain steady core power under these restrictive conditions, and the requirement to fully characterize the core flux distribution on a continuous basis, combine to discourage misuse of the core for the purposes of weapons-grade material production.

Gotta love that one of the arguments against trying to use a CANDU reactor for plutonium production is that you'd probably break the refuelling machines and the reactor too.

Of course, if you are still concerned, you can always email the guy. Or call. The contact info is there in the PDF.

Edited June 15, 2014 by phoenix_ca

[Dodgey]

Well things just got a bit warm in here. Come on guys, let's not get this thread locked. It's a topic worth discussing and there is no reason to ruin it.

Now a couple of points.

Solar thermal power was sprouted as a point that solar could work through the night. Yes it can, for only 15 hours, for the best in the world at the moment. Put any bad weather in there and you are screwed, you still need something for base load.

The amount of nuclear waste devloped is reletivly tiny compared to the amount of energy devloped. Do you contend this? Do you contend that we have safe ways of disposing of it? Do you contend with the notion that safety will only go up with nuclear?

Jwenting, what are your reasons for dismissing what the majority of the scientific community is saying? I would very much like to hear why I should believe you instead of the majority of the scientific community.

Gpisic, what do you mean by that statement? Do you mean that there is a conspiracy?

[m4v]

The tiny amount of waste generated in nuclear reactors is substantial when you have to store it for centuries.

[phoenix_ca]

The tiny amount of waste generated in nuclear reactors is substantial when you have to store it for centuries.

Compared to the millions of tons of CO₂ we dump into the atmosphere from fossil fuel plants every year, a few hundred thousand tonnes of radioactive material isn't so bad.

[Dodgey]

The tiny amount of waste generated in nuclear reactors is substantial when you have to store it for centuries.

When we have the ability to store it safetly with little or no effect to the environment? Yes it is tiny.

[shynung]

Compared to the millions of tons of CO₂ we dump into the atmosphere from fossil fuel plants every year, a few hundred thousand tonnes of radioactive material isn't so bad.

When we have the ability to store it safetly with little or no effect to the environment? Yes it is tiny.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that most of the spent fuel can still be reprocessed into fissile fuel. The remaining fission products are small enough in quantity to be considered negligible.

Edited June 15, 2014 by shynung

[Elthy]

The remaining fission products are small enough in quantity to be considered negligible.

The used fuel rods are not the main source of radioactive waste, its the stuff contaminated while running a reactor, including the reactor itself (at some day you have to scrap it).

We have about 20 reactors in germany that have to be scraped in the next 20 years, and we dont know where to put all the waste we get just from the fuel rods. So this is a very big problem for the future...

Also the deconstruction of the reactors and disposal of the waste is one point that doesnt get calculated in the energycosts, it gets paid by taxes. If you mind these nucelar power is the most expensive, by far (Sources vary from 50ct to 1€ per kW/h).

we don't need more research on breeders, we know how to build and operate them.

If it weren't for the idiots in the greeny and communist/anti-nuclear (and yes they're all the same people) lobbies we'd be operating them right now.

Of course the entire "global warming" thing itself is the biggest load of crap out there. There's no such thing, at least not as portrayed by the greenie movement.

There's natural cycles, which won't be changed by the fact that you're driving a Prius rather than a Landcruiser and living in an unheated shack burning manure to make a tiny little illegal fire to heat some porridge over rather than in a comfortable house connected to the national grid where you have central heating, a fridge filled with stuff from the supermarket, and a nice oven to make tasty meals out of that.

Be carefull, such words can get a thread locked very fast (happened several times allready)...

Also there are hints that a climatic change is just happening now. In the last 10 years we had so many hottest/coldest every recorded temperatures, strongest floods/storms etc. Something is definetly happening and saying its not the humans is like saying someone with a big bullethole in his had died of cancer...

[AngelLestat]

The solution for me, is encourage even more the new renowable technologies (their development cost is a lot cheaper than fusion or new nuclear fission reactors becouse of their simplicity).

Then encourage even more electric cars, and reduce its weight. Is silly that a car needs to weight 1300 kg to move a payload average of 80kg. If we just manage to try to focus the transportation in what we really need to move, our Co2 footprint is reduce by a lot. If you need to move 200 kg instead 1300, you reduce the energy consumption in a factor of 3 times at least.

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No! .... They are not alternatives, since they do not remove the need for having coal powerplants running in my country.

I know of no battery or other storage solution that can generate 5.000 mw's of energy for even 8 hours, 12 hours or however long would be necessary.

Nuclear is also not due cost, and the fact that you are replacing one risk for another.

Right now all storage energy technologies are growing a lot faster than any other. I can show you more than 20 approachs of prototype batteries that already double, triple or four-fold the storage capacity of old lithion batteries. Some of them can be fully charged in 5 to 10 minutes. Once these batteries enter in the market, the electric car production would have a big jump. There is already in many world parts policies to encourage this solution.

That would come in perfect time to manage the storage problem for the growing of renowable options. In fact people get paid to allow their car battery to be used as storage, this reduce a lot more the cost of electric cars.

And the comparison of a nuclear powerplant to a house is entirely valid.

A house will collapse in on itself, if it is damaged enough. Actually happens alot during earthquakes.

So, no, just because a house can collapse due to natural disasters, idiot intervention (remove a loadbearing wall during DIY) or just sloppy construction, does not mean the concept of a house is flawed.

To claim that nuclear power is very unsafe, is the equivalent of claiming that flying is very unsafe compaired to driving. Because when planes crash alot of people die right?

Well, only if you ignore it when small planes crash and completely ignore how many people drive so and so far and how many crash.

I dont know even when to start to reply this, it does not have any sense.

If instead fukushima power plant it would be a new model reactor, the problem it would be the same. There is no Nuclear plant who can stand a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.

But well, there is still a lot of old reactors as fukushima still in use in the world. What we need to do with them?

Is the endless excuse, "no that happend becouse the design was not safe, now we learn..." few years later you had another disaster, and you hear the same excuse again.

You totally just straw manned my argument. Was the rest of that paragraph too difficult to read? Here, let me quote it for you, with the relevant text in bold:

Why is everyone still talking about Fukushima-Daiichi as if it were caused by an inherent problem with nuclear engineering? It wasn't; it was a policy problem. They bloody well knew their retaining wall was too short and did nothing to fix it. They knew the buildings couldn't withstand an earthquake of significant magnitude. They bloody well knew that they had to resolve all these issues, and did nothing, because Japan has an absolutely terrible mentality when it comes to using nuclear fission. What they need is better oversight from an independent body that provides public reports; Canada has just that with the CNSC, and we've got lots of public data on the safety of our reactors (and yes, those reports include the various issues that crop-up over time too). There's practically no room in this system for power plant owners to ignore orders to improve safety at their plants and instead put all that money into resorts and bonuses.

Clearer now?

I always read everything unlike you. I dint answer becouse I already answer that many times since this discussion started, I hate write over and over the same thing.

There is not nuclear plant that withstand such earthquake.

And there is old nuclear plants in all the world, what you would do with them? Who has to paid the price to remove them from service or for future disasters? You dont understand, is the people that always paid for that! Is not included in the already high cost which them had.

50-70 years? Where in the world did you get that number? The expected turn-around on investment for these designs is about a decade.

I know to add.. and you?

This technology is in development since 50 years already, and 20 years or more are needed.. That is equal to 70 years.

Or what? You think that these last 50 years of resources expended in this technology came from heaven? That only counts the last 20 remaning? Well they said that since 50 years back.

Not if you rewrite the legislation protecting it to allow for geothermal power generation. If wind power is good enough to go mucking-up the pretty landscapes of the world, a comparatively small geothermal station in a national park should be no biggie.

Ok that way to think shows a lot of you.

First, we Humans need food and energy to live. We use our lands to get that.. Farms, and wind turbines.

It has nothing to do with mess up the only virgin places that we still had.

That is the proff that you dont care nothing about the world, the nature, the climate change.. You are only a nuclear fan who thoght that nuclear was cheap, safe (no more than 50 death in history). Now you realize that is not safe, is not cheap, it has huge cost which only people paid, but you still defend it in the same way like if nothing of this matter.

Sorry, but this is a clear sing that you are not using reason or logic in your arguments.

Yes, hundreds. We already have potential reactor designs that could reduce that waste to elements that will decay in hundreds of years. Like it or not, the best bet for cleaning-up all that nuclear waste are more nuclear reactors.

But you said that today wastes are storage in places that are designed to last one hundred years, but today wastes last thousand years. So we have a problem.

Not as deep as your average oil well (hence why the companies who do it are mostly oil exploration companies), some sites are even already venting out steam by itself. Look up oil companies ads for countries where geothermals are possible.

But is not the same. Going so deep has a cost, a cost that it is cost-efficient to extract oil, but not to a 200MW geothermal plant. How do you rise all that heat from the deeps without lose heat?

Geothermal power plants are located on land. Hawaii has a lot of potential which is not already exploit it.

[shynung]

The solution for me, is encourage even more the new renowable technologies (their development cost is a lot cheaper than fusion or new nuclear fission reactors becouse of their simplicity).

Then encourage even more electric cars, and reduce its weight. Is silly that a car needs to weight 1300 kg to move a payload average of 80kg. If we just manage to try to focus the transportation in what we really need to move, our Co2 footprint is reduce by a lot. If you need to move 200 kg instead 1300, you reduce the energy consumption in a factor of 3 times at least.

As said before over and over again: Renewable energies like wind farms and solar panels require a massive energy storage capacity. With enough bad luck weather-wise, even the highest-capacity energy storage plant will eventually run out. Modern nuclear reactors, on the other hand, does not go off Chernobyl-style when they fail, exemplified by Fukushima being mostly intact after being hit by an earthquake and a tsunami, despite being an older design.

Electric cars are a great idea for the masses, as they are more cheaper to use and maintain. However, this only solves half the problem; the reason a 1300 kg car is usually used to carry 80 kg is because they usually drive alone, which is widespread in developed countries.(Also worth mentioning is that said cars usually spends most of its time being parked.) It's mainly a problem of culture; the 1300 kg car is usually designed to carry 2000 kg or more (people use their car to carry their things around as well). My recommended interim solution? Use a bicycle, motorbike, or public transport.

[rtxoff]

Electric cars are a great idea for the masses, as they are more cheaper to use and maintain.

Electric cars are as great as switching to renewable energies is. Producing good capacity batteries for them is very expensive and bad for the enviroment. Honestly at the moment conventional cars are much greener as electric cars.

Maybe in a few years if we come up with better energy storage solutions they will be better, right now they are only for rich people which want to profile themselves as environmentalist.

[shynung]

Electric cars are as great as switching to renewable energies is. Producing good capacity batteries for them is very expensive and bad for the enviroment. Honestly at the moment conventional cars are much greener as electric cars.

Maybe in a few years if we come up with better energy storage solutions they will be better, right now they are only for rich people which want to profile themselves as environmentalist.

From the perspective of a typical everyday driver, an electric car is cheaper to use and maintain than a comparable combustion-engine car. There are less critical moving parts, and they are more efficient from an energy perspective. Their only limit, currently, is their battery capacity, which is expected to increase in several years.

But I digress. Let's talk more about alternative energy sources and less about electric cars.

[StrandedonEarth]

One option I did not see mentioned was distributed generation. I would love to be able to put a 5kW natural-gas-fueled fuel cell in my house, but the $20k-50k price tag is prohibitive. With that, I could have both heat and electricity without relying on the grid (power-outage-proof, as long as the gas supply remains intact), and even be able to sell power to the grid when house demand is low and grid demand is high. Once the price comes down, they will be more widespread. New mines for rare earths and platinum would help with price (or capture a platinum/rare earth asteroid). Distributed generation would help with peak loads, reduce transmission losses, and generally lower the demand for large base-load power plants. WikiLink. A google search provides several companies providing residential fuel cells

A note about hydropower dams: while hydro is generally considered carbon-free, dam construction is not. Also, one thing usually overlooked is that when reservoirs are flooded, the vegetation rots and releases methane which bubbles to the surface, even decades later. I've seen this in action while fishing in Williston Lake in northern British Columbia, once considered to be the biggest dammed lake in the world. The bubbles could be lit. For those who don't know, methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.

Edited June 15, 2014 by StrandedonEarth

[vger]

Electric cars are a great idea for the masses, as they are more cheaper to use and maintain. However, this only solves half the problem; the reason a 1300 kg car is usually used to carry 80 kg is because they usually drive alone, which is widespread in developed countries.(Also worth mentioning is that said cars usually spends most of its time being parked.) It's mainly a problem of culture; the 1300 kg car is usually designed to carry 2000 kg or more (people use their car to carry their things around as well). My recommended interim solution? Use a bicycle, motorbike, or public transport.

Heh, if only. It's amazing just how much hatred there is now for the prospect of doing anything benevolent.

Not long ago, NYC got those automated bike rental racks. Can't remember how it ultimately went in the end, but the initial response was insane. People were panning it as an extreme liberal leftist tree-hugging (insert endless string of generic hateful things here) communist idea. Apparently they couldn't even be bothered to realize that this thing was a BUSINESS, not a government project. This may just be an American problem though. I know at the very least when I visited London (and this was back in the 90's) the transportation made me feel like I was a few decades in the future. The tiny cars, the motor scooters, and bicycles. I was pretty amazed.

The only problem with bikes though is the lack of protection from accidents and weather. I've seen a few concept designs for fully-enclosed motorcycles before, which were equipped with autobalancing similar to the Segway (so you don't need to put your feet down to keep it upright when you're not moving). They sort of looked like the old school TRON light cycles. Even if you managed to flip it, you were safely inside a roll cage. Pretty sure sitting in it also fit like a glove, almost like you were "wearing" it as an armor suit. The idea never took off though.

Edited June 15, 2014 by vger

[lajoswinkler]

I knew that there is something into it. German Wikipedia would not mention it for nothing. It looks like english speaking folks try to hide this fact.

As phoenix_ca said, it's not a huge deal. It is possible, but it's not like RBMK.

Except the CANDU design is very sensitive to fuel balancing. I've never seen any credible evidence that trying to stick any old fissile material in one of the fuel tubes would even work; in fact everything I've read on them suggests the opposite. It's more likely that it'd prevent itself and the surrounding fuel from reaching criticality. The CANDU design has very little in the way of excess reactivity.

http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/Whitlock_IAEA_conf_Oct_2009.pdf

Gotta love that one of the arguments against trying to use a CANDU reactor for plutonium production is that you'd probably break the refuelling machines and the reactor too.

Of course, if you are still concerned, you can always email the guy. Or call. The contact info is there in the PDF.

I don't think one rod would collapse the criticality. It can't be that sensitive. All I'm saying is that it's easier for CANDU to be used for proliferation than it would be with LWRs, not that is would be easy.

we don't need more research on breeders, we know how to build and operate them.

If it weren't for the idiots in the greeny and communist/anti-nuclear (and yes they're all the same people) lobbies we'd be operating them right now.

Of course the entire "global warming" thing itself is the biggest load of crap out there. There's no such thing, at least not as portrayed by the greenie movement.

There's natural cycles, which won't be changed by the fact that you're driving a Prius rather than a Landcruiser and living in an unheated shack burning manure to make a tiny little illegal fire to heat some porridge over rather than in a comfortable house connected to the national grid where you have central heating, a fridge filled with stuff from the supermarket, and a nice oven to make tasty meals out of that.

Wow, master of trolling right there.

The used fuel rods are not the main source of radioactive waste, its the stuff contaminated while running a reactor, including the reactor itself (at some day you have to scrap it).

We have about 20 reactors in germany that have to be scraped in the next 20 years, and we dont know where to put all the waste we get just from the fuel rods. So this is a very big problem for the future...

You're referring to medium level waste. There's a lot more of it than high level waste, but it's much less radioactive. , and no, it's not a technological problem. It's a political problem, which means someone is a tight ******** and is making problems.

Decision to halt civilian nuclear program was one of the worst decisions modern German government ever did. I hope someone will end this stupidity and start 3rd generation fission reactor program.

[ZedNova]

Of course the entire "global warming" thing itself is the biggest load of crap out there. There's no such thing, at least not as portrayed by the greenie movement.

There's natural cycles, which won't be changed by the fact that you're driving a Prius rather than a Landcruiser and living in an unheated shack burning manure to make a tiny little illegal fire to heat some porridge over rather than in a comfortable house connected to the national grid where you have central heating, a fridge filled with stuff from the supermarket, and a nice oven to make tasty meals out of that.

Oh boy, what have we here?

I invite you to these pages:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/videos/category/3play_1/climate-change-101-with-bill-nye-the-science/

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence

__

Best alternative is fusion, but since we can't do that quite yet, fission is a good second.

[vger]

You don't even need global warming to grasp how big of a mess we're going to have if we don't change things. Air quality alone is more then sufficiently alarming.

Don't want to believe the forecasts? Fine. Just take a trip to Beijing.

[Stargate525]

Because if Yellowstone erupts, it will turn itself inside out and end up like Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. Not only would the damage and the death toll involved be enormous, it would completely and irrepairably demolish any thermal power plant sitting on top of it.

Granted, I might have overestimated the probability of Yellowstone ever erupting in our lifetime, but these will do for a start.

I'm a bit late to reply on this, but seriously... If Yellowstone goes, loss of power will be a much less pressing issue than making sure humanity lives through the resulting decade of winter.

And as for it being in a National Park... Seriously guys? You think that'll stop us? We built a pipeline through a national park before. There's a spot where the caldera nearly touches the boundary of the park, opposite side from Old Faithful. If someone built there, I doubt anyone besides a few die-hard hikers and boaters would ever see it.

[phoenix_ca]

I always read everything unlike you.

You know what they say about assumptions, right?

I dint answer becouse I already answer that many times since this discussion started, I hate write over and over the same thing.

There is not nuclear plant that withstand such earthquake.

Funny, all the other nuclear power plants on that very same coast survived. Perhaps some internal damage, but they remained intact. As I already said, Fukushima-Daiichi was mostly caused by poor policy. Safety policy is an integral part of reactor design, and cannot be divorced from the engineering of the reactor itself. Much of the damage to the Fukushima-Daiichi plant was caused not by the earthquake directly, but the resulting tsunami, and again, as I have pointed-out, this failure stems from poor policy decisions. They knew the retaining wall was too short but did not immediately rectify it.

Let's try an analogy. Let's say our nuclear power plant is a car. You find out that the car has a leak in the brake system and all the hydraulic fluid is gone (the retaining wall is too short); the brakes will not work. You then drive the car anyway and crash spectacularly. What was the root cause of the crash? Was it the design of the car? No. The car was designed with brakes. It was your failure to maintain that safety system that resulted in the crash.

If you look back at my arguments, I haven't made a claim that a nuclear reactor left to its own devices is safe. These power systems require both intrinsic (things inherent in the design) and extrinsic (policy) safety measures to be used safely.

And there is old nuclear plants in all the world, what you would do with them? Who has to paid the price to remove them from service or for future disasters?

We retrofit them. Fun fact, Russia still uses the RBMK reactors that they've built, and so far without incident (these are the same type of reactor that caused the Chernobyl disaster). Why? Because they recognized the inherent flaws in that particular design and acted to fix those problems in their other reactors, and they are far less prone to run-away chain reactions as occurred with Chernobyl 4.

You dont understand, is the people that always paid for that! Is not included in the already high cost which them had.

And in my country we pay for healthcare, and roads, the military, and a whole host of other social programs too. The high costs of nuclear reactors come from the capital investment in building them. Once built, if managed properly, they are remarkably low-maintenance and low-cost devices. As they can run for decades, this balances out in the long-term.

I know to add.. and you?

I vaguely recall most of my high-school calculus. I could probably integrate a function if you gave me enough time. Why do you ask?

This technology is in development since 50 years already, and 20 years or more are needed.. That is equal to 70 years. ... That only counts the last 20 remaning? Well they said that since 50 years back.

Ah, see this is the problem. I'm talking about a timescale starting at the present day. Why? For one because that's what's most relevant. How long it took for a technology to finally be developed to a level ready for practical use is immaterial to its practical applications. Let's take the history of the battery. If you go back to the very first battery, one could say that the battery has been in development for over a thousand years! Why on earth should we expect anything more to come out of battery technology in a mere decade, when it took over a thousand years just to get from the most basic voltaic cell to the rechargeable batteries we use today? I hope you can see the problem with this reasoning.

Applied to fusion power, we could easily go back and say "Well, fusion requires nuclear physics. Who was paying for nuclear physics research in the 1920s? The people!" We could go all the way back to humanity's harnessing of fire if we wanted to be really ****-retentive about it.

This is at least partially why it is far more practical to speak in terms of development time starting from today's available practical application (or theoretical basis when talking about theoretically sound but unproven technology like the Alcubierre Drive).

Furthermore, it seems that you are conflating all potential fusion designs into one. Just like nuclear fission, fusion isn't so simple. Specifically, the designs I was referring to were polywells and dense plasma focus. These designs have the very real possibility of reaching net power output within a decade. The tokamak design, as I've said before on these forums numerous times lately, is something of a giant drain we're throwing money into. There's little to no reason to expect that the tokamak will ever produce a net energy output. Why have we been slaving over this doomed design for so long? Bad policy. The US DoE decided, against the advice of many, many experts in the field of plasma physics (including proponents of the tokamak design) to pursue the tokamak design exclusively. It was a very stupid, very narrow-minded decision that prevented other far more promising fusion designs from ever being funded to anywhere near the levels that JET and ITER now enjoy.

Or what? You think that these last 50 years of resources expended in this technology came from heaven?

I'm not religious. I also didn't make any allusions to heaven or magic men in the sky.

Ok that way to think shows a lot of you.

First, we Humans need food and energy to live. We use our lands to get that.. Farms, and wind turbines.

It has nothing to do with mess up the only virgin places that we still had.

That is the proff that you dont care nothing about the world, the nature, the climate change.. You are only a nuclear fan who thoght that nuclear was cheap, safe (no more than 50 death in history). Now you realize that is not safe, is not cheap, it has huge cost which only people paid, but you still defend it in the same way like if nothing of this matter.

Sorry, but this is a clear sing that you are not using reason or logic in your arguments.

This is rampant paranoia and hysteria. I made a simple statement of fact, that all we'd really need to do is create an allowance for geothermal power plants to be constructed in Yellowstone, and you proceed to conclude that I "dont care nothing about the world, the nature, the climate change". Jumping the gun, aren't we? If I didn't care about climate change, why would I even bother arguing for nuclear power? Coal is a far cheaper source of power, and if we simply deregulated it entirely we could even burn it without those pesky limestone filters. Sure, we'd probably kill entire ecosystems with acid rain, but boy is it ever cheap. Quit jumping to conclusions about other people and attack the argument, not the person. You still haven't provided credible, robust evidence that all the assessments of cost made on nuclear power are wrong (and by the way, decommissioning costs are included in honest calculations of cost). You're making a pretty extraordinary claim. Back it up with evidence.

But you said that today wastes are storage in places that are designed to last one hundred years, but today wastes last thousand years. So we have a problem.

Nuclear waste is a problem, yes, but a solvable one. As I said in that very quote you're replying to:

Yes, hundreds. We already have potential reactor designs that could reduce that waste to elements that will decay in hundreds of years. Like it or not, the best bet for cleaning-up all that nuclear waste are more nuclear reactors.

Currently unprocessed nuclear waste usually will take thousands of years to degrade. However, there are solutions that can significantly reduce the half-life of the material, as well as reduce the total volume of material that must be stored.

My point was that if you want to reduce the half-life of that waste significantly, you need to transmute it. To do that, you need a reactor. Decommission all the nuclear fission reactors in the world and stop developing it entirely, and we really will be stuck with waste that will last for thousands of years.

Edited June 15, 2014 by phoenix_ca

[Elthy]

You're referring to medium level waste. There's a lot more of it than high level waste, but it's much less radioactive. , and no, it's not a technological problem. It's a political problem, which means someone is a tight ******** and is making problems

Waste radioactive enough that you have to seal it of for thousands or millions of years, which is simply not possible (weve tried, but the "Asse" leaked radiation after some decades).

Decision to halt civilian nuclear program was one of the worst decisions modern German government ever did. I hope someone will end this stupidity and start 3rd generation fission reactor program.

Strangely the decision to shut down everything is now accepted by everyone in the politics, not just the parties currently elected. While there are lots of arguments in the aftermath i can hardly think of any decision in the last years where so many people agree. Perhaps because everyone sees the benefits...

Edited June 15, 2014 by Elthy

[Galacticruler]

My thought was Thorium.

But then I read this. and it remaind so:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/02/16/the-thing-about-thorium-why-the-better-nuclear-fuel-may-not-get-a-chance/

[phoenix_ca]

My thought was Thorium.

But then I read this. and it remaind so:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/02/16/the-thing-about-thorium-why-the-better-nuclear-fuel-may-not-get-a-chance/

A neat article, which also underlines the relative cost of thorium to uranium by pointing out the difference in how much of the oxide is actually useful in fission. (I argued that before in this thread, and pointed out that thorium oxide is cheaper than uranium oxide per weight, but this fact slipped-by. >.> )

[SargeRho]

I think Vitrified radioactive waste can be stored underground without having to wory about any radioactive elements leaking into the water, in the case of water breaking into the storage facilities.

[lajoswinkler]

Waste radioactive enough that you have to seal it of for thousands or millions of years, which is simply not possible (weve tried, but the "Asse" leaked radiation after some decades).

It is possible. Asse wasn't a good solution, obviously.

Long term storage is possible. Vitrification, sealing in drums, drums into concrete cyllinders, those in concrete casks filled with concrete, deep underground where there is no water. It can stay there for a LONG time and it won't enter biosphere even if it leaks, and it won't leak.

Steel drums in a salt mine will leak. Obviously. But Asse had medium and low level waste, so they didn't bother with more protection.

Strangely the decision to shut down everything is now accepted by everyone in the politics, not just the parties currently elected. While there are lots of arguments in the aftermath i can hardly think of any decision in the last years where so many people agree. Perhaps because everyone sees the benefits...

Politics is a *****. If you rely on politicians, you're in for a bad time. Instead, listen to engineers and scientists.

There is no net benefit of such action. PV and wind can not create base load, and increasing coal consumption is a bad thing. Taxes must rise. It's that simple, really.