I'm going to quote something I said in an earlier thread:
So I think that's what we need to work for... interlocked energy self-production and municipal production, really, with on-site storage media included.
Less emphasis on distribution, more on network...with everyone ideally able to pretty-much self-power for short periods.
Yes we would all love that, but we live in reality not utopia.
If nuclear is to be used at all, I still am going to look at it as probably the least-bad of alternatives that are undesirable, and something to be worked away from, enabling a longer-term transition to a renewable economy.
Building nuclear power does not disable transition to renewables. How this for an idea: instead of building anymore coal plants (as we are), we build nuclear plants instead, save thousands of lives a year and reduce pollution overall, even radioactive pollution when you consider coal fly ash. And at the same time we can continue developing and installing renewables.
We can make a lot of gains by building buildings better than we do now, and retrofitting older ones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design
So there's still a lot of what's called "low-hanging fruit" in terms of energy gain to be had in building design. That's a notoriously stodgy industry there...and it bugs me no end when I see houses going up in the same old, lightly-insulated style as ever (this week, it was a 3000 sq ft McMansion, it will probably cost $500 a month to cool from the get-go, west-facing picture windows
)
I'm all for living more efficiently and it will likely be a necessity, because everyone in the world wants a first world living and world population is still increasing so efficiency will most likely only be able to take a bit out of the rising demand.
As far as nukes...the waste issue-I will not consider it solved until it IS solved. 95% is reasonably good...it still makes nukes less than desirable.
Less desirable then what? Then the billions of tons of pollution from coal we pump into the atmosphere? Oh that right you want pollution free renewable, well if so I advice you go out and protest the construction of coal power plants right now then!
To make them desirable in my book you'd need to be able to get that waste down to a totally inert state-pretend I'm from Missouri and show me it can be done.
Lets ask in return, how much waste do we get making solar panels?
Breeder reactors and subcrit reactors are good...although subcrit reactors have the issue of not being terribly good for power production-I skimmed, but apparently they require being powered up and powered down.
In theory they would be fine for energy production, the energy input to output ratio is as high as 1 to 60. Consider ethanol production for example manages an average ratio of 1 to 1.25. Oil production today manages and average 1 to 5 and dropping. Many solar panels actually have negative energy ratios like the GaAs because of how energy intensive it is to mine and purify their construction materials.
There's the proliferation issue...not a worry in a nation with nukes...but in any country with political instability and no nuclear bombs?
A Provider and Client state international regulation system could solve that. Only some nations would breed and reprocess and other nations would just buy and build powerplants that the Provider nations invest in, fuel and recycle from. Breeding nuclear weapons grade materials can be made very hard, it requires a different array of centrifuges for U-235 and it requires an intensive breeding system for Pu-239, anything less and your U-235 will be to inpure, your Pu-239 will be too polluted with Pu-240 and Pu-241, weapons production gets even harder with thorium-U233 production.
Do you really want them to have a plutonium-making machine?
And then of course there's the whole "dirty bomb" issue...the hotter the stuff you get your hands on, the better that works...
I worry more about all the smug and CO2 china spews out, probabilistically that is killing and going to kill far more people then a terrorist dirty bomb.
So I think that renewables top out nuclear in terms of pollutants (because there are pollutants involved in making some of the harvesting technology...another thing to work on), and it therefore makes sense to give priority to maturing renewables. Because there's a lot more potential there.
Sure renweables would be great, but for now we can keep building nuclear power, renewables are growing but will take many decades of growth and investment in grid storage, etc, in the mean time baseload power plants WILL be built and if not nuclear they WILL be Coal or to a smaller extent natural gas and oil powered. You must open your eye to the harsh reality of decisions that have to be made, its not renewables now and no more coal, oil, gas or nuclear power, its renewable now and still growth in the other four! As is because of hysteria and ignorance of people it will be limited growth in nuclear power and more extensive growth in the deadlier and more costly fossil fueled power plants.
Around here, people seem to be highly enamored of nuclear, so the reason I'm getting so evangelical about it is because it seems that
(a) my concerns about radioactive waste are getting cavalierly dismissed
As they should be, considering we can so cavalierly dismiss pollution from other sources, pollution that is millions of times larger and harder to contain and manage.
(b) people here seem to be willing to count renewable resources out before we've poured a lot of money and engineering expertise into trying to make them work.
No, not at all, I'm all for investment and development in renewable, if I had the money I would totally build a net power producing home with solar and wind and what not right now. But I accept the reality that we will still need baseload power for decades to come.
Nuclear and fossil fuels get TONS of funding...renewables mostly have not.
huuum, perhaps we could actually look at the numbers, how much actual government investment has been made into nuclear power recently compared with renewable? Which one is growing faster in the marketplace?
