Campaign for Nuclear Energy.

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
HMGovt said:
Economics schmeconomics. The state can always make enough money if it wants. And what's economical about spending $87 billion upfront on the Waronterr, plus countless billions in the aftermath, just to secure oil. I don't think the economic models your argument depends on are very wide-ranging or flexible.

You're not in a position to make a judgement since you haven't seen them. However I would have thought that the total failure of nuclear on world stock markets would count for something regardless of whether the state will pay for a means of arming itself.

Nuclear power is not the answer. The change in our lifestyles required to address global warming is fairly minor.
 

xero

was minusone
HMGovt said:
If the engineers do a good job - and they seem to have done in every non-Soviet built nuclear reactor commissioned since the mid-70s - the only outputs are electricity, warmish water and a wee gust of radioactive gas every now and then. Compare that with the megatonnes of CO2, particulates and sulphur sent skywards by conventional power stations (plus all the proven hideousness of hydrocarbon politics).

Is this true? Is there no radioactive waste? I have almost no knowledge of the science or engineering of nuclear power but I thought it was a given that some waste products are produced which are impossible to get rid of (spent fuel rods?) aren't these recycled into battlefield weapons (depleted uranium or some such?)

also haven't the very non-soviet Japanese had a number of nuclear accidents in the past ten years or did I imagine that?
 

DigitalDjigit

Honky Tonk Woman
I heard something about a new nuclear power technology "pebble bed" reactors (I think) . Apparently it is safer, cheaper and performs better.

Nuclear energy will not cut down demand for oil all that much since oil is used to power cars and since there is no battery technology out there good enough for cars (not enough mileage, not enough power) electricity will not be able to substitute just yet.
As for the nasty geopolitics from oil, suppose that nuclear power replaces current power plants. Won't the demand for uranium shoot up? Uranium is pretty rare and not found everywhere, wont' it bring us right back to where we are?

I really doubt that the serious environmental problems ahead of us can be solved simply by changing to nuclear since we are messing up nature in so many other ways. There is also a lot of lag in the climate system so even if all carbon emissions stop the temperatures may still go up for a few decades.
 

lush

Member
This article sets out to say nuclear is the only sensible option. Mainly through economics:

Current operating costs are the lowest ever - 1.82 cents per kilowatt-hour versus 2.13 cents for coal-fired plants and 3.69 cents for natural gas. The ultimate vindication of nuclear economics is playing out in the stock market: Over the past five years, the stocks of leading nuclear generating companies such as Exelon and Entergy have more than doubled.
 

DigitalDjigit

Honky Tonk Woman
The only truly sensible option is reducing energy use.

So what happens when we run out of uranium, a much rarer mineral than oil?
 

LRJP!

(Between Blank & Boring)
i'm not sure if i'm just falling for the bait here but...

HMGovt said:
Nuclear energy is clearly the way forward. The dangers of radioactivity are overstated - didn't the Power of Nightmare weave that idea into its final synthesis last night, debunking the dangers of dirty bombs? It did.

A dirty bomb is just some radioactive material together with some conventional explosive, it’s just a way of spreading radioactivity over a wide area as opposed to an atomic reaction; essentially it’s a mortar and some old x-ray machines and nothing to do with fission.

DigitalDjigit said:
The only truly sensible option is reducing energy use.

So what happens when we run out of uranium, a much rarer mineral than oil?

As I understand it you need very little Uranium (or whatever) to actually run a plant and indeed a certain amount of the waste products can be used in reactors too, so it is still a medium to long term prospect, no? Hardly a solution but I guess a point in Nuclear’s favour.

I think to be ‘pro’-nuclear is to be very optimistic or dangerously laissez-faire; it seems to me that the less easily fissionable material and the fewer reactors we have lying around for the next Xthousand years the better…
 
DigitalDjigit said:
That's funny but there are more practical ways to reduce energy use. How many useless lights are burning there every night?

One thing you don't have to worry about with nuclear energy.

You see, nuclear energy is not FUNDAMENTALLY bad in the way that fossil fuel burning is. The shortcomings of nuclear energy are engineering problems whereas the shortcomings of wind power are capacity and the shortcomins of fossil fuels are grossly environmental.
 

LRJP!

(Between Blank & Boring)
HMGovt said:
One thing you don't have to worry about with nuclear energy.

You see, nuclear energy is not FUNDAMENTALLY bad in the way that fossil fuel burning is. The shortcomings of nuclear energy are engineering problems whereas the shortcomings of wind power are capacity and the shortcomins of fossil fuels are grossly environmental.

Surely Wind and Solar shortcomings are engineering issues too? Getting as much as possible for as little as possible put in - in terms of surface area or quantity or whatever.
 

borderpolice

Well-known member
DigitalDjigit said:
Here's some statistics: If nuclear were substituted for coal in the US for the purposes of electricity generation, the uranium reserves would last 35-58 years.

See here: http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-7/p47.html

that article speaks of current technologies, which i don't think include breeder type of reactors. the latter
would stretch the availability of fissible material for much longer. But they are more easily usable in the
production of nuclear weapons!
 
Without fuel they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.

On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.

Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver.
 
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