Energy Crisis Solved by Science

[Quaxar]

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.

No, they don't. And they also cannot provide anywhere near the energy demands of modern society on their own.

And of course, as I suspected, the first and ONLY response I get is the ubiquitous "meltdown"; a pet peeve of mine but an important identifier.
Just for future reference, "meltdown" isn't a scientific term. Try as you might, you won't find it in any nuclear textbook. It was invented by the mass-media and is used by them on an ignorant public.
The correct term is "super-critical", but that doesn't strike instant fear into the public like "meltdown" does, does it?

Woah man, calm down. I am well aware of current scientific terms and the energy output of renewable sources vs nuclear and fossile fuels, I just wanted to keep it short and simple because frankly I am awfully tired today.

Note: I personally think "the reactor had a meltdown" sounds rather dull compared to "the reactor has reached critical mass". Makes me think of a power plant made out of butter.

 

[gigastrike]

So when can I buy my nuclear-powered car? /sarcasm

 

[Da Orky Man]

I'm still confused on what these new 'Kernel' power plant are...Don't tell me, it runs on Vista?

All forms of energy sources emit CO2 either primarily or secondarily and I believe any fission based nuclear power plants are inefficient no matter what.

Well, yes, fission plants are inefficient. They get about 0.01% of the fuel turned to energy. However, coal gets about 0.0000000000000000000000001% efficiency.

 

[Mr.Numbers]

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.

Please tell me this is sarcasm.
Waste is the issue of nuclear power precisely because you can't just put it underground and pretend it doesn't exist (although most governments do just that anyway).

Are you by any chance a NEI representative?

The average amount of waste produced by a nuclear power plant annually can fit under your houses coffee table...And then large portions of that can be recycled, either back into the grid or as medical applications.

Nuclear power gets an awful PR perspective, but nuclear power has advanced so much since the 60's, like everything else, and things like Chernobyl were due to EXTREME EXTREME Negligence.
Like AMAZING levels of shit being not given.

3 Mile island resulted in a total of 0 fatalities. Robots have killed more people.

All in all Nuclear power = good, Australia has tons of deposits for it and, best of all, great way to recycle those warheads if we can dilute them a little

 

[Low Key]

Whether we like it or not, nuclear energy is the future. Solar, hydro, wind, and geothermal will be there too, but nuclear plants are relatively safe (if you don't put them near a fault line) and more efficient. Once science figures out how to get more efficient with their solar cells, I see us moving in that direction, but that won't be for a while. They can barely get 25% efficiency out of them and they don't do anything on cloudy days.

 

[Staskala]

The average amount of waste produced by a nuclear power plant annually can fit under your houses coffee table...And then large portions of that can be recycled, either back into the grid or as medical applications.

Nuclear power gets an awful PR perspective, but nuclear power has advanced so much since the 60's, like everything else, and things like Chernobyl were due to EXTREME EXTREME Negligence.
Like AMAZING levels of shit being not given.

3 Mile island resulted in a total of 0 fatalities. Robots have killed more people.

All in all Nuclear power = good, Australia has tons of deposits for it and, best of all, great way to recycle those warheads if we can dilute them a little

Not every nation has huge amounts of unused land where they can just "casually" deposit nuclear waste. Storage is a big issue in Europe, Japan and pretty much any country that isn't Australia, China, Russia or North American.

Granted, most leaks happened in the past when people thought dumping nuclear waste into lakes was a smart idea, but even now one thing is certain: No matter what kind of storage facility you build, it will decay much faster than the waste, which means that the waste not only has to be regulated and controlled but will also have to be relocated at some point in time. Several times.

Smart nuclear waste management is still an issue, additionally complicated by a shitload of old, badly handled waste that's still around and forever will be.

Edit: Come to think of it, maybe it isn't fair to accuse the nuclear power industry of most storage issues, as waste is also "produced" by the military. I'm not really sure how the two compare though.

 

[electric_warrior]

Ummm, is this nuclear power. I'll check later, but I'm pretty sure this is nuclear power.

Actinouranium is a bit of a giveaway

 

[Olorune]

Hooray for Uranium!!!

...right?

Electricity is the best solution to the energy crisis. It may be vulnerable to solar flares and certain means of deactivation, but it's better than killing the planet any more than we already have.

 

[JMeganSnow]

Fusion or bust. Unless you find a suitable way of storing the waste materials (which can also be used for great destruction) then fission creates more problems than it solves.

Actually, the best thing to do with the waste materials is to design your plant to keep the reaction going until they turn into lead, which is not radioactive. However, this is a problematic design.

However, radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is not as dangerous as most people believe. Not that it's harmless, either. But burning coal fills the atmosphere with sulfuric acid which isn't safe either.

In the end, it's a tradeoff. Do you want electricity? Or do you want no waste products? Ultimately you can't have both.

 

[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.

Erm...Okay.

Geothermal and Hydroelectric are far more efficient if the right location can be found but still, fission is inefficient that includes on how long they take to be built, dismantled and the lifespan; 30-40 years.

They are the second most efficient thermal based power plants,yes. Only because there are no combustibles used (obviously) in the process.

You've completely overcomplicated what I was getting at, most likely because you've misread what I meant by 'efficiency'.

In Physics, the efficiency of a process is the ratio of the energy you get out to the energy you put in. Nuclear power only requires a single neutron to start a self-maintaining chain reaction meaning that, aside from controlling the rate of reaction, it will continue to produce energy with no other input indefinitely, resulting in a very high efficiency. Hydroelectric power and geothermal power will lose energy largely in friction and pumping the heated liquid from the Earth, respectively.

Of course, once you take into account lifespan, resource availability and the suchlike, this figure for efficiency becomes merely a number to be thrown around in lists of pros and cons - however, it is not a collective name for these pros and cons which, in conclusion, is where our misunderstanding stems from.

 

[Leppy]

Geez, one night and already 5 pages. I'd like to apologise for any inaccurate information I included in my first post, truth is, I'd been awake for 20 hours and just grabbed information from random sites in Google.

The purpose of the post was to see how quickly people jumped onto the Chernobyl mentality, putting their fingers in ears and shouting "Lalalalala I can't hear you." While I believe nuclear power is a great stepping stone for the next reliable power source, in 100 years or so, I do realise the drawbacks.

Honestly, if scientists were to present the facts to the public, and call it...say 'Boiler Reactor' or some other name that steers far away from the words nuclear, uranium, plutonium... The public would rejoice over it, the truth of the matter is, as a race we need to get over past incidents and realise nothing is completely safe but far better alternatives to coal do exist.

Thanks for the responses, you may now continue to shout "COLD FUSION!!!eleven!one!" as though it'll be the Higgs Boson of power generation.

 

[Princess Rose]

OP: I think your experiment failed. Everyone figured out it was nuclear power like immediately.

OT: Anyway, as someone pointed out, nuclear power has VASTLY improved in the past few decades.

Most nuclear waste can be recycled into more nuclear material. The process strips out usable metals (like iron) and leaves them less radioactive than naturally occurring iron. It's actually pretty neat.

Also, American designed nuclear power plants are VERY safe. They are effectively meltdown-proof - they use their water coolant as a catalyst for the nuclear reaction, meaning that if the water is lost, the reaction stops. It's a really neat system. It makes the plant less efficient, but FAR safer than the Russian design (which is more efficient, but less safe).

Anyway, I'd love to see more nuclear power around, but people are very scared of it. The government did a LOT of anti-nuclear propaganda during the Cold War, so I don't see things changing any time soon. Too bad.

 

[Low Key]

Actually, the best thing to do with the waste materials is to design your plant to keep the reaction going until they turn into lead, which is not radioactive.

Lead is radioactive. I don't know where you got the notion that it isn't, but it is. That's why lead paint isn't used anymore and why graphite is used instead of lead for pencils. People and animals were getting sick from radiation poisoning eating the paint chips and putting pencils near their mouths.

 

[k7avenger]

Actually, the best thing to do with the waste materials is to design your plant to keep the reaction going until they turn into lead, which is not radioactive.

Lead is radioactive. I don't know where you got the notion that it isn't, but it is. That's why lead paint isn't used anymore and why graphite is used instead of lead for pencils. People and animals were getting sick from radiation poisoning eating the paint chips and putting pencils near their mouths.

Wrong. They don't make lead paint because kids like to eat it, as it has a slight sweetness taste to it. And had you been paying attention in class, you'd realize that lead is toxic (poison), not radioactive. It builds up in your body and never leaves. Kind of like mercury, and other heavy metals.

EDIT: Yes, I realize that some isotopes of lead ARE unstable. However, no one, not even the Chinese, are stupid enough to use them in place of non radioactive lead. The radioactive decay of uranium does indeed make non-radiative lead isotopes. Check Wikipedia.

 

[Low Key]

Actually, the best thing to do with the waste materials is to design your plant to keep the reaction going until they turn into lead, which is not radioactive.

Lead is radioactive. I don't know where you got the notion that it isn't, but it is. That's why lead paint isn't used anymore and why graphite is used instead of lead for pencils. People and animals were getting sick from radiation poisoning eating the paint chips and putting pencils near their mouths.

Wrong. They don't make lead paint because kids like to eat it, as it has a slight sweetness taste to it. And had you been paying attention in class, you'd realize that lead is toxic (poison), not radioactive. It builds up in your body and never leaves. Kind of like mercury, and other heavy metals.

I confused radioactivity with toxicity. Oops

Yes, I am wrong.

Spoiler: I did find this however

"For practical purpose, lead can be considered stable. 98.6% of the lead ordinarily found in nature is of stable isotopes. 1.4% of lead is 104Pb, which is radioactive, but the half life is 140,000,000,000,000,000 years. There are traces of 210Pb found in nature, and its half life is 22.3 years, but the quantities are not significant. Like all elements, synthetic radioactive isotopes of lead exist."

Not that it makes a difference.

 

[k7avenger]

All's well and good so long as something was learned today. That might have sounded a wee bit harsh...

 

[Esotera]

Fusion or bust. Unless you find a suitable way of storing the waste materials (which can also be used for great destruction) then fission creates more problems than it solves.

Actually, the best thing to do with the waste materials is to design your plant to keep the reaction going until they turn into lead, which is not radioactive. However, this is a problematic design.

However, radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is not as dangerous as most people believe. Not that it's harmless, either. But burning coal fills the atmosphere with sulfuric acid which isn't safe either.

In the end, it's a tradeoff. Do you want electricity? Or do you want no waste products? Ultimately you can't have both.

Creating carbon dioxide or sulphuric acid is a chemical process; it's very easy to reverse the reaction (now or in the future), or convert them into some useful byproduct. Undoing nuclear reactions is an entirely different ballpark. There are ways to reduce production of radioactive waste, but practically once you've generated a waste product with a long half-life, you're stuck with it.

And I'd definitely agree with radioactivity being poorly understood. My degree requires work with radionuclides, and a significant minority don't understand the basic physics behind it. The general public is even worse.

Come on engineers, get your skates on, I think fusion power's great... ...because no ones ever talked about the problems it may have. Yaay optimisim

The biggest potential problem is if a fusion reactor goes out of control. Effectively you could get a sun on the Earth's surface, which would be interesting, to say the least...

 

[Booze Zombie]

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

Aside from the fact that you've just renamed a radiactive substance, there is also the fact that all this would do is give a hungry society more energy to spend inefficently, where as we could instead master the art of efficent energy use and save everyone a lot of bother.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

And then what do we do with the waste product, eh? Bury it deep underground and pretend it doesn't exist. Sure.

 

[DracoSuave]

Snip

Point being is that nuclear material is recyclable, the same as any other material. Nothing is 100% recyclable and nothing in reality is 100% renewable. After all the sun expends fuel to produce sunlight meaning that both microwave and solar power are non-renewable in the sense that people generally use them.

As for nuclear proliferation that is a whole other topic to discuss and really doesn't play a role in the energy debate.

Except that you're not recycling nuclear fuel. You're converting non-fuel into plutoneum. That's not recycling, that's just more efficient use of matter.

And yes, Nuclear proliferation DOES play a role in the nuclear reactor debate, because nuclear proliferation was caused by... get this... the availability of breeder reactors such as the CANDU in countries that would not otherwise have access to weapons grade plutonium.

See, the thing is... there is only ONE source for plutonium in the world. Breeder reactors. And there is only one way to convert u238 into nuclear fuel. Breeder reactors.

To suggest that breeder reactors can't be used like that is to cover one's ears and go HURPDURPHURPLALALALALALLALALA while people mention every single country in the world with nuclear weapons programs that aren't the big five (US, UK, France, Russia, China.) Every single other country in the world with the bomb got it from breeder reactors. Every. Single. One.

Fissile material can only be used to make bombs or as nuclear fuel. It has no other purpose.