Energy Crisis Solved by Science

[BlueMage]

Nuclear power of any kind, although playing a big role, can't solve the energy crisis on its own because you can't power vehicles (except boats) with it. Without most modes of transport, there will be no global food and goods network, and no country is anywhere near being self sufficient at this point.

just hook nuclear plant up to electric water-splitter. BAM, mobile hydrogen fuel.

Alternatively, plug-in electric vehicles?

 

[Berenzen]

Still we need to get Hydrogen Fusion working. There are working prototype reactors out there, so don't say it isn't possible. They just don't have the capital to do the testing and research they need to produce and run them at full scale.

The issue with Hydrogen Fusion is the million degree heat/ Terapascal pressure that is required to start the reactor, not to mention the amount of thermal energy released is essentially noncontainable.

Australia has vast, untapped quantities. Bow to us.

So does Canada

 

[Canid117]

This sounds all good, but approximately how much Actinouranium is there in the world?

No idea why the OP is calling it that but a name you may recognize is Uranium 235. It is the same type as used in nuclear weapons I believe. All in all thats less than 1% of natural uranium and its a ***** to refine for most countries.

 

[Kryzantine]

Australia has vast, untapped quantities. Bow to us.

So does Canada

The problem with the 2 countries is population. Namely, who the fuck is going to mine it in Canada and Australia? You don't have enough people to do it yourselves and turn a profit at the same time.

IMO, both countries should open the floodgates and let the immigrants in, but that's not going to happen, both ironically have gotten more conservative over the last few years.

I think it's a bit funny that this thread turned into a debate over the safety of nuclear power instead of talking about solutions to the energy crisis. I might make a new thread about it.

 

[BlueMage]

the same people who think that cellphone waves can cook your balls

Um, WELL, have a read on near-field and far-field electromagnetics. It's been a year or two since I worked through the maths (and with a frigging awesome lecturer who made sure everyone came to the lectures by virtue of putting NOTHING on the uni intranet. QUT engineering and maths students, I think you know who I mean) but the maths on the emissions are pretty cut and dried.

It was funny watching the rest of the guys suddenly scramble to move their phones after they completed copying down the formulae and then suddenly realise what it meant.

 

[Luke5515]

What if we take all the radiation and shoot it into space?

 

[Berenzen]

The problem with the 2 countries is population. Namely, who the fuck is going to mine it in Canada and Australia? You don't have enough people to do it yourselves and turn a profit at the same time.

IMO, both countries should open the floodgates and let the immigrants in, but that's not going to happen, both ironically have gotten more conservative over the last few years.

I think it's a bit funny that this thread turned into a debate over the safety of nuclear power instead of talking about solutions to the energy crisis. I might make a new thread about it.

Actually, Canada does happen to mine quite a lot (we have a town in northern Saskatchewan called Uranium City) but we primarily ship it to the U.S. and our own local nuclear reactors.

 

[BlueMage]

Australia has vast, untapped quantities. Bow to us.

So does Canada

The problem with the 2 countries is population. Namely, who the fuck is going to mine it in Canada and Australia? You don't have enough people to do it yourselves and turn a profit at the same time.

IMO, both countries should open the floodgates and let the immigrants in, but that's not going to happen, both ironically have gotten more conservative over the last few years.

I think it's a bit funny that this thread turned into a debate over the safety of nuclear power instead of talking about solutions to the energy crisis. I might make a new thread about it.

World macro economy being run by folks who don't understand that growth can't continue indefinitely tends to do that.

As to solutions: Wire every house, every building, with at least a 2kW solar array. BAM! Insta-decentralised-grid during the day. Sure, might need a few other plants here and there for the load overnight, but consider that most folks aren't at home during the day, so those cells can just sit there, generating electricity, and charging batteries. All I can say is BAM!

 

[demoman_chaos]

It is incredibly expensive to launch things into space. The recently retired shuttles cost roughly $450,000,000 to launch, and carry a payload of 26,786 kg. There is around 2,721,000kg of high level nuclear waste generated per year in the US. To launch this to orbit, let alone to The Sun, with current technology would cost around $47,000,000,000 per year. This is of course a very rough estimate, with possiby unreliable data, but illustrates the difficulty of doing so.

In the long term, this cost could be reduced by developing better ways to deliver the payload, but that in itself will be incredibly expensive. The money could be better spent researching new fuel sources such Fusion.

A giant slingshot will do the trick, or a big catapult. Those don't require any fuel, are simple to build, and are historically proven to be good at throwing large things a very long way.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Right, because using uranium is totally safe as we all know.

Any form of energy transference on scale large enough to power a modern country is highly dangerous at some level; whether it be collection, refining/enrichment, or as active fuel.
There is environmental/immediate safety risk in *all* of those systems.

 

[Elementlmage]

Still we need to get Hydrogen Fusion working. There are working prototype reactors out there, so don't say it isn't possible. They just don't have the capital to do the testing and research they need to produce and run them at full scale.

The issue with Hydrogen Fusion is the million degree heat/ Terapascal pressure that is required to start the reactor, not to mention the amount of thermal energy released is essentially noncontainable.

Not true, it's just the MIT has been trying to go to big to fast. There is a scientist in Britain who has made a working reactor that is safe enough to run on his office desk while he is sitting next to it.

It is rather ingenious; instead of attempting to trigger fusion through a high temp/high pressure reaction and then attempting to contain the result, he uses a pair of high energy dually opposed "fuel injectors" to fire streams of hydrogen at each other and trigger fusion through the impact. The result is an easily containable "micro" fusion reaction(the stray particles can be held in the container with a magnetized Faraday Cage), that produces huge (comparably) net energy yields and is dirt cheap to manufacture.

 

[peter337]

I believe any fission based nuclear power plants are inefficient no matter what.

Science cares not for what you 'believe'; nuclear power is, when compared to other power sources, efficient.

 

[Nikolaz72]

Not sure if anyone here has heard the news, but a scientific discovery may solve human-kinds energy crisis, as well as dramatically cut down world-wide pollution and Co2 emissions. As you know, coal is quickly running out, with predictions saying we could run out of fossil fuels in as little as 100 years. Here's some facts about these new 'Kernel' power plants:

1. They require NO FOSSIL FUELS - Instead using fuel called Actinouranium which is a renewable source of energy that could power the world for 10,000+ years. In fact, Actinouranium the size of a pencil eraser can provide as much power as 6 tons of coal. The icing on the cake is that use of this fuel creates zero (0) greenhouse gases.

2. The difficulty of mining coal, as well as coal emission pollution is responsible for an average of 30,000 deaths -Per year- in the US, and as many as 500,000 per year in China. That's half a million fatalities a year in one country! Comparatively, in the mining and production of Kernel power, there have been zero recorded deaths in the US.

3. Waste- Apart from the mentioned greenhouse gases produced by coal, it also produces approximately 3 tones of ash -Per Second- and over 100,000,000 *One Hundred Million* tones of waste per year. To compare, Kernel power produces just small amount of spent Actinouranium rods per year, which can be safely stowed deep underground without posing any threats to the environment.

It's getting late, so I'll sum up. More efficient, cleaner, cheaper, renewable energy that could sustain the human race for many thousands of years, till we come up with an even more effective way of power production.

Spoiler

-For the intelligent ones, I've steered away from words that have a negative stigma attached to them, call it an experiment- Read more http://russp.org/nucfacts.html

You do realise that this fuel produces large quantities of lethally dangerous, HIGHLY polluting waste that remains a persistent lethal threat for millenia, that is costly and very dangerous to store, nearly impossible to dispose of safely, and that in the event of an accident at the power plant, almost unlimited environmental damage can result.

Also, the mining of it is dangerous and limited.

Interesting experiment you're trying out, but anything can be made to seem good if you don't mention the bad

BTW, Actinouranium = Uranium 235, for those wondering

Nationalist Socialism-

Improves economies.

Creates jobs.

Raises Production

Creates Fair immigration laws.

Puts people who break the law into camps where they will be taken care of for the rest of their lives.

Aint Nazi's great.

 

[RoBi3.0]

The death toll for nuclear power per Terrwatt hour generated is 10 times lower than wind power.

I am not making this up, wind power is 10 times more deadly than nuclear power.

Deer are 300 times more deadly than sharks. But I am still gone be more careful around sharks.

I think this post clearly points out how to solve all our energy problems. Deer Power Nuclear Power Plants! 300 times more awesome the the Shark powered variety.

I like the idea of Nuclear power as long as it is far far far away from me. Sure it is clean and safe, but everything happens and it only takes 1 one in a million happenstance to fuck everyone living near a plants day up.... forever.

 

[Elementlmage]

when it comes to a debate over the merits of nuclear power (for the few who still don't get it, that's what this was about), i find little to no redeeming argument against its use.

consider this: name 3 big nuclear power plant disasters. if you named Fukushima, 3 mile islanf and Chernobyl, congratulations, you named them all. now consider how each disaster was caused and later panned out. Fukushima was cause by a magnitude 9 earthquake and consequent tsunami, enough to wreak havoc on any facility. Chernobyl occurred 30 years ago due to inept soviet technicians trying to cut corners on safety protocols, and remains a powerful reminder of what happens when nuclear power goes wrong. 3 mile island on the other hand occurred due to a mechanical failure, and was swiftly repaired. the damages of 3 mile island have been regarded by experts as negligible and people continue live within short distance of the location.

Sure it's safe as long as there isn't a disaster, but there will inevitably be some kind of accident around a nuclear facility. If you have an earthquake near a coal plant it isn't going to irradiate the surrounding area for generations. It's hydrogen powered cars, right? It's very environmentally friendly and efficient, but the problem is that if you get into an accident it will probably explode. It works well by itself, but it's like playing with a loaded gun.
Again, I am still pro-nuclear power, but it does carry far greater risks than other forms of energy when accidents or acts of nature happen.

Besides a massive coal-dust explosion?

Anyway, that is beside the point as Coal plants DO in fact, produce radiation. You might be surprised to learn that coal plants produce the bulk of man made radiation and dwarf the amount of radiation released into the environment produced. In fact, over the course of 30 years, coal plants of released more radioactivity into the environment than Chernobyl ever did, not to mention the people that die every year just mining the shit!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Do you dare disagree with such a reputable publication?

 

[Raesvelg]

... Well... That shut me up.

I don't have much more to add that everyone else hasn't mentioned already. Nuclear energy is clean and effective energy, but the potential risks are often higher than most people would want to take, especially given the NIMBY principle.

Pretty much, lol.

Now, the 4th generation reactor designs that are in the works in theory address a lot of these issues; they're even safer, vastly more efficient, can operate on fuels that most current reactors cannot, and produce a lower total volume of waste besides.

Part of the problem, of course, is that none of them will be ready for about another decade at least, largely because research into new reactor designs for power generation has been rather desultory for the last couple decades. If you can't really build them anywhere (NIMBY), then there's no point investing significant money in R&D to make better ones. Most of these projects have been limping along, with little to no private industry research being done.

The truth of the matter is that it took an incompetent crew operating a flawed reactor design to create the first significant nuclear accident (Chernobyl), and a freaking tsunami and 10.0 Richter earthquake to produce the second.

Whereas the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, through a combination of negligence and incompetence, managed to kill more people than every nuclear reactor accident ever by a significant margin, yet somehow nobody freaks out quite so badly when someone opens a chemical plant nearby.

 

[Quaxar]

Right, because using uranium is totally safe as we all know.

Any form of energy transference on scale large enough to power a modern country is highly dangerous at some level; whether it be collection, refining/enrichment, or as active fuel.
There is environmental/immediate safety risk in *all* of those systems.

Sure, but sun collectors don't have a chance of going into nuclear meltdown. However, I was mostly thinking about how after the Japanese Fukushima thing a lot of people might not be too fond of a new and unestablished form of nuclear power plant.

 

[Atmos Duality]

*possibly/probably a double post, but screw it, I felt the need to comment on this*

As to solutions: Wire every house, every building, with at least a 2kW solar array. BAM! Insta-decentralised-grid during the day. Sure, might need a few other plants here and there for the load overnight, but consider that most folks aren't at home during the day, so those cells can just sit there, generating electricity, and charging batteries. All I can say is BAM!

The reasons we don't do that in the United States is:
1) Solar panels of that quality are expensive to sell, even with tax incentives.
2) Decentralizing the grid in such a fashion sounds really great on paper, but in practice the grid works because it can run within a tolerably predictable pattern of loading/unloading.

Remember: Unspent Electricity doesn't just vanish into the Aether. People complain about major blackouts due to overloading the grid? UNDERLOADING is just as much of a threat. Why? Because backing off generation doesn't come at the drop of a hat. If you back off too much, you get brownouts. If you don't back off quickly enough, then you do what's calling "Tripping the grid/reactor".
In short, overcharging the grid is BAD. Very bad.

So even if you did accomplish the pipe dream of standardized solar panels, you have now introduced the element of weather into the equation, which is a *highly* fickle force to predict on its own, and by its mechanics cannot be relied upon to provide sufficient off-grid generation in every climate.

Now, I do agree with solar generation in principle; it's going to become critical to address widescale electrical generation in the near future, and I'm wouldn't hold my breath on "miracle sources" such as fusion to become viable before then.

However, backing off from our existing primary fuel sources will take careful planning, pragmatic/scientific thinking and far more freedom from politics and business than our current system provides.

 

[Raesvelg]

Not true, it's just the MIT has been trying to go to big to fast. There is a scientist in Britain who has made a working reactor that is safe enough to run on his office desk while he is sitting next to it.

It is rather ingenious; instead of attempting to trigger fusion through a high temp/high pressure reaction and then attempting to contain the result, he uses a pair of high energy dually opposed "fuel injectors" to fire streams of hydrogen at each other and trigger fusion through the impact. The result is an easily containable "micro" fusion reaction(the stray particles can be held in the container with a magnetized Faraday Cage), that produces huge (comparably) net energy yields and is dirt cheap to manufacture.

Source?

This one slipped past me, I am interested in reading more.

 

[ryanxm]

nucular power you say? Uranium you say?

all is going acording to plan...