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View Full Version : Time to start reconsidering Nuclear Power



Mushroom
05-11-2010, 01:38 PM
I'm talking nuclear generated power, not weapons. Deaths by nuclear accident in US history: Zero. Don't forget we have nuclear submarines that have been running on this stuff for decades. No Deaths. 3-Mile Island? No Deaths. We already reprocess a portion of Russia's spent nuclear fuel.

So what do we do? Continue with coal and natural gas while the rest of the world... oh nevermind. How many lives have been lost in the coal mining industry? I believe it's nearly 400 deaths since 2001.

Imagine all of the money we are throwing at alternative energy sources with huge footprints (e.g. wind turbines and solar), not to mention the environmental effects of those huge footprints. Birds deaths by wind turbines are an ornothologists nightmare. NIMBY's in my town recently voted against constructing wind turbines on a hill east of our town. Wasn't it Teddy Kennedy's state that recently turned down the installation of wind turbines off coast in the atlantic?

I envision more effort and resources expended on nuclear energy can promote innovation and solve some of the issues associated with nuclear energy, because that's what we do best!

FORD
05-11-2010, 01:56 PM
So you're volunteering your back yard to store the nuclear waste, then?

The shit's not safe, and who the hell wants to trade oil wars for uranium wars?

WACF
05-11-2010, 02:01 PM
We have looked at it here is Saskatchewan for the last two years.

What it came down to is that all the good points were out weighed by the cost.

Too expensive...and...we have uranium here and also looked at refining and storage...so we just mine it and send it off to Ontario.

Mushroom
05-11-2010, 02:13 PM
So you're volunteering your back yard to store the nuclear waste, then?

The shit's not safe, and who the hell wants to trade oil wars for uranium wars?

from your response, I can only guess that you are ok with the continuing use of coal and natural gas, and you are ok with dedicating enormous swaths of land for wind turbines?

WACF
05-11-2010, 02:33 PM
Wind turbines are all right but not the answer for sustained energy.

Little factoid...when the wind does not blow hard enough gas generators are used to turn them...

FORD
05-11-2010, 02:36 PM
Let's put it this way....... A "wind spill" in Nantucket sound (or anywhere else they build windfarms) isn't likely to cause major damage. A Nuclear waste spill equal in proportion to this BP clusterfuck in the Gulf would kill half the goddamn planet, and give the rest cancer.

There should be three rules for future energy development:

1) Nobody "owns" the source.

2) No wars are ever fought over the supply.

3) Generating this energy doesn't cause more harm than good.

Solar & wind pass all three tests. Nuclear fails all three.

FORD
05-11-2010, 02:42 PM
Wind turbines are all right but not the answer for sustained energy.

Little factoid...when the wind does not blow hard enough gas generators are used to turn them...

Sure.... under the current system.

But if you had a grid where all the alternative sources contributed to it.... say for example, on the days when it wasn't windy, odds are the sun would probably be out. So on those days, your solar panels would be generating more energy. And there's geothermal energy, which would involve some drilling into the earth, but wouldn't be anywhere near as destructive as oil or coal in that respect.

Seshmeister
05-11-2010, 02:56 PM
Wind turbines are all right but not the answer for sustained energy.

Little factoid...when the wind does not blow hard enough gas generators are used to turn them...


Also when the wind blows too hard you can't run them either.

Jagermeister
05-11-2010, 03:09 PM
I'm talking nuclear generated power, not weapons. Deaths by nuclear accident in US history: Zero. Don't forget we have nuclear submarines that have been running on this stuff for decades. No Deaths. 3-Mile Island? No Deaths. We already reprocess a portion of Russia's spent nuclear fuel.

So what do we do? Continue with coal and natural gas while the rest of the world... oh nevermind. How many lives have been lost in the coal mining industry? I believe it's nearly 400 deaths since 2001.

Imagine all of the money we are throwing at alternative energy sources with huge footprints (e.g. wind turbines and solar), not to mention the environmental effects of those huge footprints. Birds deaths by wind turbines are an ornothologists nightmare. NIMBY's in my town recently voted against constructing wind turbines on a hill east of our town. Wasn't it Teddy Kennedy's state that recently turned down the installation of wind turbines off coast in the atlantic?

I envision more effort and resources expended on nuclear energy can promote innovation and solve some of the issues associated with nuclear energy, because that's what we do best!

I’m for nuclear power. With today’s technology it would be virtually fail safe. I feel better about it that I do about thousands of barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Jagermeister
05-11-2010, 03:17 PM
Kinda long but worth watching.

binnie
05-11-2010, 03:22 PM
I certainly wouldn't rule if out, but we really need to think about safe and economical ways of disposing of the waste - crack that and I think it is a very feasible source of energy.

The problem with wind and solar energy is the sheer number of panels/turbines needed to fulfill our needs - as it stands now, I feel that we need to be thinking in terms of complimenting rather than replacing: using multiple sources of energy to lessen dependence upon oil and gas. If the percentage of energy supplied by wind/water/solar could increase incrementaly over the next 15 years we would be in a much better position. Putting all of our eggs in one basket won't work.....

Unchainme
05-11-2010, 03:37 PM
So you're volunteering your back yard to store the nuclear waste, then?

The shit's not safe, and who the hell wants to trade oil wars for uranium wars?

FORD, when stored properly it wouldn't go anywhere near there, it would be stored deeeep down in some mountain in Nevada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usg7-xbQOcM

FORD
05-11-2010, 04:21 PM
FORD, when stored properly it wouldn't go anywhere near there, it would be stored deeeep down in some mountain in Nevada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usg7-xbQOcM

No it wouldn't. Because spineless Harry Reid bitched and whined about the Yucca Mountain thing and got the Obama administration to pull the plug on it. (If only that worthless Mormon shit had fought as hard for actual health care reform.)

Ironically, this was right after the administration made a big push in favor of nuclear power. So now there will be new nuke plants with nowhere to dump the waste.

Unchainme
05-11-2010, 04:32 PM
No it wouldn't. Because spineless Harry Reid bitched and whined about the Yucca Mountain thing and got the Obama administration to pull the plug on it. (If only that worthless Mormon shit had fought as hard for actual health care reform.)

Ironically, this was right after the administration made a big push in favor of nuclear power. So now there will be new nuke plants with nowhere to dump the waste.

which is why Harry Reid is a spineless cunt, like you said previously. If you're going to go and do nuclear power, that is probably the way you should do it.

not to go off topic, but Reid is probably my least favorite senator alongside Pelosi, he's been pretty much a shill for special interests for quite a long time, there's even a character based off of him in "Casino".

Seshmeister
05-11-2010, 05:43 PM
A fact that almost noone seems to know is that coal fired power stations release about 100 times more radiation than nuclear power stations.

There is radioactive material in the dust that spouts out of them which people inhale causing lung and thyroid cancers. The usual estimate is that this shortens the lives of(i.e kills) over 20 000 Americans a year.

Since no new nuclear power stations have been built since Long Island(when the safety systems worked and noone was hurt), what you have now is a bunch of very old nuclear power stations rather than the much safer ones that are around now.

France is 80% nuclear and has never had a single accident. Only coal, gas, hydro and nuclear can be used for base load electricity production. Everything else is kind of window dressing since it can never do more than about 20% because it can't be guaranteed.

kwame k
05-11-2010, 07:15 PM
Here's a great episode of Scientific American Frontier that deals with Hydrogen and renewable resources.

Notice the old couple from Livonia, MI that have perfected Hydrogen for cars and have a roofing shingle that is on the same principle of solar panels but the huge difference is......these look just like a normal roofing shingle, are bendable and are, for lack of a better word, just like your roof shingles but produce solar power! Roof your house and have generate solar power, too.

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kwame k
05-11-2010, 07:22 PM
As far as all of America's infrastructure goes........we need to update date everything and haven't paid any attention to it in decades. We're 30+ years behind most other countries.

Nuclear power would be great if we could figure out a sane way of dealing with the waste, other than digging a really deep hole because at some point that will come back and bite us in the ass.

Kinda like the toxic shit of 50 years ago......at some point we'll have to deal with the stupidity/shortsightedness of burying it.

knuckleboner
05-11-2010, 08:25 PM
i'm all for more nuclear plants.

wind, solar and hydro, too. but nuclear should definitely be an component.

kwame k
05-11-2010, 08:37 PM
Done responsible and hardcore research for the prolonged effects of the waste and the maintenance/improvements of the new nuclear plants........

Too many times in our history we jump on an energy source and give no credence to the long term ramifications. I just don't want my kids to have to deal with another mess we created thinking it was a good idea at the time or a knee jerk reaction. Whatever direction we go for energy we need to do it sensibly and look at the long term impact. I'd rather spend the money wisely now and come up with a good direction. If we need to spend billions on our infrastructure, so be it but let's look at it like your own home. Investing x-amount of dollars will save you x-amount of dollars in the long run. Take those two numbers and find the break even point and decide what to do in the short term and what we need to do in the long run.

Heating your home with a geothermal heat source would be a great idea if you plan on living there for 30 years or so but to invest in it for a house you'll only live in 5 years makes no sense, kinda thing.

Nitro Express
05-12-2010, 02:59 AM
So you're volunteering your back yard to store the nuclear waste, then?

The shit's not safe, and who the hell wants to trade oil wars for uranium wars?

I actually used to guard nuclear waste at Hanford. No shit. Everyone wants the power but nobody wants the waste. They were starting to convert weapons grade plutonium to reactor fuel. I was cleaning out my closet the other day and found all my security badges and my radiological training cards. There where places on the site that would give you as much radiation in the middle of the night as standing under the full sun at noon. Then you had the guys with the M-16's and machine guns that would fire blanks and scare the shit out of you in the middle of the night. All those guys were contractors and that was my first taste of the Blackwater thing. The DOE is just contractors feeding off the government. It's no different than the military. They have a lot of technology that could do the country a lot of good actually but it probably will never see the light of day.

Nitro Express
05-12-2010, 03:14 AM
I also worked the Pit 9 project in Idaho for Lockheed/Maritn. In 1961 the military needed early warning bases in the arctic to send warning of Russian nuclear bombers advancing. The government decided the best way to power such bases was with small nuclear reactors. They pushed the envelope technology wise for the time and ended up with a small prototype reactor that if the fuel rods were pulled too fast the reactor would overheat, distort the rods so they couldn't be put back in. Well this happened unfortunately and the reactor overheated and blew. Three men were killed and one was pinned to the ceiling speared by a section of steam pipe through him. It took three days to get him down. Nuclear radiation was scattered over southeast Idaho, northern Utah, and western Wyoming. The three dead men were shipped home in lead lined coffins. The reactor and equipment was buried in a pit.

Lockheed built a facility to dig up the contaminated pit with robots and encase the radioactive contents in molten glass blocks. It was a huge project but then it was decided if something went wrong they could make the situation worse. All I know is the project came to a halt. The incident about the reactor accident in 1961 was still classified when I worked for Lockheed but now is apparently declassified since it was talked about on some show on Discovery or the History Channel ( I don't remember which). Anyways, it always made me think what else has the government not told us about. As far as I know there hasn't been any higher cases of cancer in those areas since the accident. It was far from being chernobyl but a dirt pit in Idaho has a melted down reactor from a big screw up in it sitting in the middle of nowhere on the DOE site. There is also a HUGE aircraft hanger left over from the US Air Force nuclear powered bomber program. Yes, they were designing a aircraft with nuclear propulsion on it! The hanger is still on the north end of the site. They store nuclear waste in it now.

Nitro Express
05-12-2010, 03:24 AM
There is a street in Boise Idaho called Warm Springs and the homes are heated with geothermal heat. Some of them are very cool victorian homes that people have fixed back up. One guy uses the natural hot water to culture sea coral and live rock for aquariums. He's got quit an operation going.

The coolest hot spring is in Utah. It's a salt water hot spring you can scuba dive into and the specific gravity is the same as parts of the ocean. Someone thew in some ocean reef fish like tangs and damsils and they survived so in Utah you can scuba a warm salty home with reef fish in it.

Seshmeister
05-12-2010, 04:04 AM
Apparently if you used nuclear power for all your needs for your whole life the high grade waste at the end would be the size of a coke can.

That mounts up with 300 million people but still...

Nitro Express
05-12-2010, 05:50 PM
My uncle is a nuclear physicist. He graduated in the top 1% of his class at MIT and spent most of his career before retirement at Los Alamos Labs. lt's interesting to talk to him and one of his main frustrations is what's in the way for a better world is not technological but political and economic. He said wind and solar are old technologies and nuclear technology is way more advanced since the US last built a nuclear power plant.

Seshmeister
05-12-2010, 06:30 PM
People don't get the numbers. If we think in Gigawatts.

1.21 GW is what is needed for the DeLorean in Back to the Future. :)

The Hooover damn produces 2 GW at it's peak.

The biggest coal fired power station in the world produces 4 GW

The biggest nuclear reactor in the world is in Japan and produces 8 GW.

The US average usage from all sources is 3500 GW.

A good wind turbine produces 2 MW so you need 500 of these windmills to create a GW or assuming someone worked out a way to overcome the problems of non windy or too windy times you would need 3500 x 500 = 1.73 million wind turbines in the US.

Mushroom
05-12-2010, 09:25 PM
Droughts affect hydroelectric dams. Look at Hoover Dam today, Lake Mead has dropped by ~150 feet or so. The power generated is a function of the distance the water falls.

If global warming proponents are so clearly focused on reducing carbon emissions, nuclear power needs to stay in the conversation.

BigBadBrian
05-13-2010, 08:56 AM
He said wind and solar are old technologies and nuclear technology is way more advanced since the US last built a nuclear power plant.

Your uncle would also probably tell you it would take 180,000 wind turbines going non-stop 24/7/365 just to generate 20% of America's energy needs. Wind-generated power is clearly NOT the way to go.

kwame k
05-13-2010, 11:28 AM
If you look at it objectively, solar and wind power is just too cost prohibitive and, for lack of a better word, bulky.

To have a city getting 100% of it's power from say solar energy would require miles of solar panels. We're not there yet and you can point fingers anywhere you want......lobbyists, big oil, and the like but it still doesn't get us a sensible plan to stop using coal, oil, and natural gas.

It seems obvious that we like to pay lip-service to the buzz words like renewable energy and carbon footprints but that's all we're really doing. The oil crisis of the 70's taught us nothing and by the 80's we were right back to making gas guzzling cars.......

Even if we started today, we wouldn't be off the teat of fossil fuels for years to come and Americans have yet to show the will to force our government to change. Other countries are going in the direction of drastically reducing their consumption of oil but it takes a concerted effort and money to change a nation's infrastructure.

If any President or politician came out and said they were going to raise taxes by 2% or whatever number, to invest in getting us off of fossil fuels by say 2020 (never gonna happen but it's an example)......the Teabagger's, talking heads and Joe six-pack would shit themselves over it.

Going back to my house example......if you could cut your heating/cooling bill in half by investing in energy efficient windows and adding blown-in insulation, for say, $10,000.00 and you plan on living in that house for the rest of your life, wouldn't you consider making the investment? Why can't it be that simple for us as a nation to realized this? All these sound bites about making us energy efficient and for the security of our nation, are wasted by lack of action.

Being in a constant state of war and wasting billions on a defense strategy that is so outdated doesn't help, either. To fight the war on terra do we really need all the toys in our arsenal when we're not dealing with a conventional enemy? Will building more ships, planes, and gadgets help defeat a relatively small group of people.......sure, the drones are helpful but do we need to spend 60% of our money a year on defense? Will having another battleship or fancy plane help "win" a war against an enemy hiding in cave?

Seshmeister
05-13-2010, 05:53 PM
The two things are kind of related though.

Not that it can happen but would the US need an empire held together with a trillion dollar army if she didn't need oil. Nobody is likely to invade the US so it must be for something.

If you factor in the 'defence' spending is oil any cheaper than renewable or nuclear?

Blaze
05-13-2010, 06:50 PM
If a home had solar panels shingles and one turbine wouldn't that be enough for that single home?
I ask honestly, because I do not know how much a shingle solar roof and a single turbine would produce for a home.

Seshmeister
05-13-2010, 07:00 PM
I know those little wind turbines you see on the top of houses are bullshit.

I heard a statistician work out that they provide the equivalent of 12 seconds of driving your car each day.

chefcraig
05-13-2010, 07:31 PM
I know those little wind turbines you see on the top of houses are bullshit.

I heard a statistician work out that they provide the equivalent of 12 seconds of driving your car each day.

In South Florida they are quite common, as I have two of them on my roof. They circulate the air in the attic, cooling it greatly and significantly save money on our electric bill when running the A/C in the summer, which starts in March around here.

Va Beach VH Fan
05-13-2010, 09:44 PM
Your uncle would also probably tell you it would take 180,000 wind turbines going non-stop 24/7/365 just to generate 20% of America's energy needs. Wind-generated power is clearly NOT the way to go.

I think you'd agree though that placing them strategically in the high wind areas of the country (i.e., the Mountain time zone states) would at least HELP, don't you ???

kwame k
05-13-2010, 09:54 PM
Depends......start up costs and maintainability verses savings over how many years?

If you spend say, $30,000.00 dollars for something that only saves you a $1,000.00 a year.....is it worth waiting 30 years for the break even point before it even starts saving you money?

No one thing is the answer....there's no microwave mentality that's gonna fix all our energy needs quickly, IMO.

Va Beach VH Fan
05-13-2010, 11:05 PM
Well, you're not going to get around startup costs, but the long term benefits will outweigh them....

But you're right, it's gotta be a combination of several things...

Blaze
05-14-2010, 01:07 AM
In South Florida they are quite common, as I have two of them on my roof. They circulate the air in the attic, cooling it greatly and significantly save money on our electric bill when running the A/C in the summer, which starts in March around here.

Really?
That is the first thing you think of when hearing turbine?






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There are so many kinds and sizes available.
This is just one example of one that is affordable to build.
They also come manufactured.

I am surprised walmart hasn't started providing their own energy and selling the left over to the communities.