Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:33 pm Post subject: Re: nuclear power
minervx wrote:
The merits of nuclear power greatly outweigh those of oil (soon to be extinct) and solar power (not cost effective due to subsidies).
Oil and nuclear power are subsidized as well you know. In Canada the company that builds nuclear power plants gets a few hundred million in federal funding a year (it's federally owned). In many countries the central government basically covers all of the insurance (that is, if there is a disaster they'll pay for the clean up). Fossil fuels get more money in subsidies than renewable energy (not on a per-kilowatt-hour basis of course, but it's still telling).
Now, that said, I'm not opposed to nuclear power. I'm quite open to building one more generation of nuclear power plants to be used until renewable energy is cheap enough and we have really good battery technology. But I'm not actually sure if it's the best bet fiscally, especially when you consider that we really don't know yet how much it will cost to dispose of all of the waste. With renewables we do at least have a fairly good estimate of the total lifetime cost. Also, nuclear can only be built in big chunks--most reactors produce at least 1GW, and even the smallest would usually produce at least 500MW (new technology has the potential to change this, but it isn't available yet). So you need to do it big with a huge initial investment. Compare that to solar or windmills where you can add a 50MW a year and steadily grow it. Finally, nuclear power plants take a long time to plan, regulate, and build. Various reports say that we really need to be cutting CO2 emissions by the end of the decade. We might just be able to manage that with nuclear if we started now, but it would be a very tight thing. Had we been more proactive and started building them in the 90's or 00s then this wouldn't be a problem. But we didn't. So we really might need something which we can build faster.
All of these are just practical problems I have with nuclear. I have no problem with it in principle for short term use (for the long term I think that it's just tidier and potentially cheaper to use renewables). If a power company feels that nuclear is the best bet for zero-emission power then they are welcome to build a nuclear power plant.
Joined: Sep 22, 2008 Age: 76 Posts: 29328 Location: New Jersey
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2012 8:09 am Post subject:
DC wrote:
Nuclear power is a very political topic, ask Angela Merkel...
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Only because the leftists and the eco-freaks make a political issue out of it. The objective of the left is to impoverish the population and make them dependent on government. The eco-freaks hate the human race and want it gone.
Nuclear power is a very political topic, ask Angela Merkel...
.
Only because the leftists and the eco-freaks make a political issue out of it. The objective of the left is to impoverish the population and make them dependent on government. The eco-freaks hate the human race and want it gone.
ruveyn
Try to have some understanding of what your opposition actually stands for when you criticise, ruveyn.
I don't think we've heard the end of Fukushima. That only happened a year ago. I'd rather decentralize the grid as much as possible. The individualist in me likes the idea of taking personal responsibility for something as crucial to modern living as electricity, and the democrat in me likes the idea of people having control of the electrical grid rather than a few corporations. There's a movement to build open source wind turbines and solar panels. Even if there will still have to be power corporate owned power plants to balance out the load, tied grid, domestic systems would help significantly lower the need to build new power plants that run on non-renewable fuels, like uranium, coal, or oil.
I'm greatly interested in DIY projects like these. You can build a wind generator from 400 dollars worth of scrap parts, within the course of a few weeks, that's powerful enough to meed the energy needs of a medium sized home in areas where wind is strong enough.
Last edited by JNathanK on Mon Jun 11, 2012 2:39 pm; edited 2 times in total
When will man, the smartest being on the planet, ever learn how or try to harness gravity? It is cheap, plentiful and renwable.
It's called hydropower.
Also I think geo thermal takes advantage of the heat created by the compression of gravity in the earth's mantle. If we could somehow develope a way to drill through the earth's crust and tap in to this heat energy I think we'd be pretty set for our energy needs.
When will man, the smartest being on the planet, ever learn how or try to harness gravity? It is cheap, plentiful and renwable.
It's called hydropower.
Also I think geo thermal takes advantage of the heat created by the compression of gravity in the earth's mantle. If we could somehow develope a way to drill through the earth's crust and tap in to this heat energy I think we'd be pretty set for our energy needs.
Most of the heat in the Earth's core comes from radioactive decay. Some of it is residual heat from the formation of the Earth (which was extracted, for lack of a better word, from the gravitational potential of the things forming the Earth), but I'm pretty sure that radioactive decay is the dominant heat source.
Joined: Mar 20, 2011 Age: 24 Posts: 7593 Location: North Carolina The Tar Heel State :)
Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 7:51 pm Post subject:
ruveyn wrote:
Joker wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
Joker wrote:
Nuclear Energy is also cheap.
Not if you factor in the cost of handling the waste safely.
ruveyn
True but it is still pretty cheap.
No. It is not. Unfortunately oil and natural gas are cheaper which is why were are burning them.
ruveyn
Take away the fact of the cost of handeling nuclear power it is sorta cheap. Plus oil will not always be here finding other natural gases will be hard when their is no more oil.
