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Monday, July 20. 2009
Nuclear Power and Fighting Global Warning
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You forgot the poor mine workers that are exploited to mine that shit.
I agree to your conclusion.
Just one point:
Nuclear Power Plants may be operated safely, all by themselves. And they even might be built sturdy enough to withstand a crashing airplane. But what about missles of any kind? We enjoyed a long peace here in Europe, but we should not forget that war is possible here, too.
I wonder what would happen if a missle hits a NPP...
I'm not sure whether Tom is referring to coal or uranium miners, neither has really good working conditions. I've heard it claimed that the ratio of mining deaths to energy produced is worse for coal than for uranium - but I suspect that at least part of that is due to the coal mines in developing countries.
The problem is not that we use too much energy, but that we generate it in the wrong ways. Solar, wind, and geo-thermal power can supply much more energy than we currently use. Everyone in the world could use as much electricity as Americans and Australians and still only use a fraction of the solar and wind power that is available.
Also wind farms can be installed on farm land, they take about 1% of the land area and provide extra revenue to farmers while not interfering with the farming.
Inevitably someone will try to claim that wind power is too variable. That only applies to a small area. Use HVDC to link a continent and it's not a problem.
"I also believe that it may be possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely, that our (Swiss) experience is not just luck ..."
Do you happen to know that we (Swiss) actually had a Nuclear Meltdown (Kernschmelze) in Lucens? [1]
what do we learn from this: all humans are liable to make mistakes even the swiss ;-)
[1] "http://www.google.ch/search?&q=Lucens+kernschmelze"
You say: "Mining and enriching uranium is a very inefficient process both in terms of tonnage and in terms of energy" ... "to the extent that some claim it is less efficient than to use the energy directly instead of mining uranium and then producing electricity."
For the enrichment you don't need to use (other) energy sources - the French enrichment plants are all nuclear powered. Mining does use fossil fueled diggers and so on, but I doubt they use enough fuel to replace 80% of French electricity production!
You say: "known uranium deposits wouldn't last 20 years once nuclear power would seriously be used to replace coal as a source of electricity." -
Thorium. Re-reading some old Pohl and Kornbluth SF recently I was struck by the 40s-50s assumption that nuclear power would come from thorium reactors - they were only wrong because thorium is no good for plutonium production, and most of the early reactors were build to make bombs.
"it is said (again, sorry, I don't have a link ready) that the known uranium deposits wouldn't last 20 years once nuclear power would seriously be used": this is only true for U235, which is the current combustible. However, all upcoming designs of nuclear reactors target U238, which is 100 times more common (and doesn't need enrichment). So this reasoning is mostly a strawman.
Australia and the US have large amounts of desert. Canada and Alaska have large areas of icy desert that also have no people.
I am not aware of environmentalists trying to oppose wind farms, please cite some references. The opposition comes from urban areas and farmers, the farmers can be paid for the use of their land and given the financial problems that most farmers are experiencing that should solve the problem.
Not that nuclear or coal power plants are scenic either.
Finally some of the most politically unstable parts of the world have been able to maintain wells for gas and oil and pipelines to transport gas and oil large distances. They should be able to manage solar thermal power plants and HVDC lines.
If north America was powered by solar thermal plants in the US deserts and wind farms in Canada and Alaska, Australia was powered by wind farms on the coastal farmland and solar thermal plants in the desert, and Europe was powered by wind farms and solar thermal plants in Africa then the problem would be pretty much solved.
Note that the Chinese government doesn't have any problems with NIMBY attitudes of it's citizens. :-#
PS You need a blog comment system that supports paragraphs.
Mining and enriching uranium is a very inefficient process... to the extent that some claim it is less efficient than to use the energy directly instead...
http://www.wikinvest.com/concept/Nuclear_Energy claims the energy return (EROI) is about 4.5 (matches what I read in a scientific magazine recently), so it's not true by far. It seems to be more efficient than coal power plants.
The technology that does have this problem is biofuels (for vehicles, especially the "biodiesel"), which do have EROI below 1 in some cases used. Note, that generating electricity from biomass requires much less preprocessing and gets reasonable EROI.
I generally believe we should not be saying we should or should not be using something altogether. There are risks and costs in everything, so rather than allowed or denied I think the non-monetary costs should be estimated—and appropriately taxed (see wp:Externality)—and let the economy deal with it. I think nuclear powerplants would come out better than coal and oil ones, but worse than most renewable ones.
Ad wind power (and to large extend solar power as well): There are large hidden costs to them because of their inherent unreliability. The wind can stop blowing and sun can be covered with clouds anytime and the electrical network needs to have a backup source available for when that happens. And in electrical network, failure to meet the demand usually means immediate large-area black out, because the overloaded source will fail to keep frequency, disconnect and make the problem worse.
Also because the wind and solar power plants can't be built anywhere, the network will need much higher capacity.
Moreover, nuclear power plants can't serve as backup, because they take days to start up, hours to change output level and can't operate on less than about half power.
PS: The comment system does support paragraphs—it supports HTML.
Jan: How do you appropriately assess the externality of the risk of terrorists gaining access to nuclear material and tax it?
While I generally agree that externalities should be taxed appropriately, some risks are difficult enough to assess and so horribly expensive if things don't work out that they won't fit in to such a scheme.
The wind will NOT stop blowing over the area of Europe (or even of the EU), the area of the USA, or the area of Australia. Sunlight is pretty predictable too if you use moderate areas and periods of several days. Store enough energy from the sun in molten salts to provide power for a few days and the problem is solved.
Gas turbine power plants can spin up in about 5 minutes if they are in hot-standby mode. Drops in wind power can be predicted more than 10 minutes in advance.
Also note that there are many electricity uses that can be deferred if necessary. When we have smart meters that can change the billing rate on a per minute basis it will be easy to specify which devices get the expensive power and which don't. For example fridges and freezers can have their cooling mechanism delayed by ~30 minutes without any loss of performance, heating water can be delayed by hours, and some industrial processes could be delayed by days if it was necessary to get the cheapest rates.
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