Nuclear energy - Opinions on its use as a power source?

I'd like to say most of my views stem from good old common sense.

To me, nuclear is not "green" and probably never will be unless a life form on the planet evolves to being unharmed by radioactivity, has a voracious appetite for radioactive metal and its waste products render said radioactive metals inert. Radioactive emissions are the quintessence of toxicity to life. Some forms of plutonium used in nuclear reactors have a half life of over 300,000 years?!

I've got to tell you. The common sense part of me sees nuclear power as an option in a theoretical world where human life could not exist except with the power generated by nuclear. In such a theoretical world, it would make sense to me but in no other. I would have no problem, for example, if wind turbines became a ubiquitous part of life and landscape.

IMO nuclear power is like Russian Roulette. Everything is OK unless the trigger hits a bullet filled chamber. Life is too unpredictable (natural disasters, human error, mechanical malfunctions, terroristic attack/sabotage, etc) to play such a game for energy created in that manner.

Chris L

You want a series of huge wind turbines in the lots surrounding your house? Most folks don't. Many many people die each year in coal mining throughout the world and who knows how many cases of cancer come from breathing the particulates from coal or oil fueled power generators. Travel to coal mining areas and look what the landscape looks like. In a world where oil will become more and more expensive and coal just dirty nuclear is an alternative unless they get serious about solar or geothermal.

All this current concern about nuclear power tends to make one think about what might be going on with the reactors from the eight U.S. and Russian nuke subs that have sank in waters around the globe. And what about the nuclear weapons they had on board. Or maybe the nuclear waste from Hunters Point Navy Yard that was dumped in the Pacific near the Farralon Islands before they had any better disposal methods. Hear the ticking?

We've known for 50+ years that reactor meltdowns are extremely hazardous, even deadly. In July 1959, one of the reactors at the Santa Susana Field Lab in far northwest Los Angeles County/eastern Ventura County suffered a partial meltdown that was later described to be worse than Three Mile Island. Over the next several years, this facility saw four of 10 reactors suffer accidents. Later on, we saw Three Mile Island, and later still Chernobyl. Based on this track record, nuclear power could have been done away with years ago, but it wasn't. Why? In spite of the risks, it does what it's supposed to, providing a reliable source of electricity.

As for wind power, it may have some promise...Pros and Cons of Wind Power, but I think there are still too many hurdles to overcome.

Currently there is no real serious alternative to replace nuclear energy. Sad but true. Not only business, society and factories but common people as well need more and more energy to keep and improve their standard of living.

Green energy technologies are still in their babies shoes, so windmills or solar power with current poor efficiency are not realistic option for nuclear/water/coal energy. Non of these current main energy powers aren't harmless either.

Every single modern and past nuclear reactor is based on nuclear fission which leaves radioactive nuclear waste. Once scientist succeed on building reactors that work on fusion power then there will be no radioactive waste of such amount any more. It has already tested in laboratories but estimated time when such reactor could operate is about 2050 or so.
What is wrong with current nuclear plants is that almost all of them are build near teutonic plate boundaries or shore making them very vulnerable for things like earthquakes, tsunami or sea level rise.

I hope that recent tsunami strike in Japan will make scientist to improve current green energy technologies to be more effective. Also i hope it makes people to understand that the power they use is just not something they get from the wall socket. If we want greener energy then we need to use it less with the technology we have today.

It seems to me that one very common problem is to not properly evaluate the cost of doing something vs. the cost of not doing it. For example fossil fuels are really good long-term energy storage, and if you mostly care about the cost of extraction and distribution they're really cheap at the present. But when you start factoring the environmental and health impacts, the equation can change quickly. Even the simplest thing of taxing pollution, so that you can account for the total cost a little better has been stalled in US for decades.
And the problem is the same if not worse with every other energy source. Everybody wants to externalize as much of the costs as possible and especially when that involves tons of money it's fairly easy and cheap to just brainwash the public.
Nobody wants to walk, shiver in the cold, give up the american military dominance, etc.. Nor to have wind turbine, coal mine, or nuclear storage, in their back yard, and neither do they want to pay somebody else whatever it takes to do it. So you just ignore the problem and just kick it down the road for some other generation to figure out (which occasionally works due to big innovations, but it's still completely irresponsible).

Nuclear energy is no different than anything else. You can make it as safe as you want but it'll cost you.
At the end of the day the best way to make sensible policy is to compare the real costs between the various alternatives, but unfortunately this requires less gullible voters. Until then it's almost all politics.

You bring up a good point. Most people who talk about nuclear energy talk about how safe it is...that is unless of course something goes wrong or it's being built near them. There are currently two plants in California built on a fault line with a prediction of an 8 plus earthquake on the richter scale in the future. How safe will it be then!

There are areas in this country where wind turbines could be placed out of the way that would provide plenty of safe electricity. As it stands, nuclear power only provides 8% of our energy use in this country, which probably also contributes to its lack of incidents. If we conserved more as a society we could probably make that up. Once we start building more plants and depending on it the incidents are likely to rise with a great cost. And don't forget we'll have to de-regulate them over time because that works so well for us!

There's a plant in NC that holds spent fuel rods from two other nuke plants. It's estimated that an explosion in that pool could blast more than three times the materials into the atmosphere as was released from Chernobyl. To me that "what if" factor is too much. I'd rather look out my window and see a wind turbine than see the roof of a nuke plant in the distance.

John

There are 2 important issues to keep in mind.

1) modern reactors are built to use a different type fuel and work according to different principles. It is simply impossible to get a melt down if the cooling fails because it's the coolant that makes the reaction possible. Older reactors are still the design which can go critical and which are in effect nothing more than controlled nuclear bombs. The only reason those older reactors are still used is that they are not yet written off, and they still produce energy.

2) coal plants actually barf loads of radioactive dust in the atmosphere on a daily basis. You don't hear much about that because it's in American interest to keep burning coal, and 'everybody knows nuclear is bad'. The thing is: unless you are very near the fukushima reactor, you are getting more radiation from your granite tabletop.

In the early 20th century they figured that they would lose one ironworker per floor on average when building a skyscraper. That was an acceptable level of risk at that time. Safe work practices developed that improved that statistic considerably. The old saying that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs comes to mind. When they build nukes, chemical plants, cement plants there is certain amount of danger to the surrounding community. That is life in the big city. How many more people get killed driving to and from work every day than have been killed as a result of nuclear power plant accidents ?

I've worked in nuclear power plants on shut downs quite a few times back in my ironworker days. Been in the containment and around the spent fuel pit and seen fuel rods with my own eyes thirty years ago, and lived to tell the tale. I can only say that the cost of maintaining nukes is astronomical compared to conventional units and than you have the problem of dealing with radioactive waste. Affordable energy is already a problem and it won't get easier as the population increases. Tough out there and getting tougher every year that goes by. I think we need to take advantage of the nukes while we work on alternatives. There are risks but that is part of life.

I'm not too worried about nuclear. Generally its pretty safe, as long as the plants arent on a fault line, or in Soviet Russia. Perhaps there is something I don't know, but building a nuclear plant on a fault line just seems like a bad idea in the first place.

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Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

In the early 20th century they figured that they would lose one ironworker per floor on average when building a skyscraper. That was an acceptable level of risk at that time. Safe work practices developed that improved that statistic considerably. The old saying that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs comes to mind. When they build nukes, chemical plants, cement plants there is certain amount of danger to the surrounding community. That is life in the big city. How many more people get killed driving to and from work every day than have been killed as a result of nuclear power plant accidents ?

I've worked in nuclear power plants on shut downs quite a few times back in my ironworker days. Been in the containment and around the spent fuel pit and seen fuel rods with my own eyes thirty years ago, and lived to tell the tale. I can only say that the cost of maintaining nukes is astronomical compared to conventional units and than you have the problem of dealing with radioactive waste. Affordable energy is already a problem and it won't get easier as the population increases. Tough out there and getting tougher every year that goes by. I think we need to take advantage of the nukes while we work on alternatives. There are risks but that is part of life.

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Its interesting how this has changed. I know in the 60s when they were trying to get to the moon people were dying right and left. If they'd been doing that today, one accident and the whole program would have been mothballed for years. We likely would have never gotten to the moon.

I'm ex-Navy and most folks don't realize just how many nuclear power plants there really are. Look at all of the submarines and surface ships in our U.S. Navy fleet. Until we learn to harness "green" energy and the technology to make enough energy to feed the energy monster's/end users (all of us), nuclear energy is a very viable option that is probably more effecient than natural gas and/or coal energy combined.

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Originally Posted by shooter74743

I'm ex-Navy and most folks don't realize just how many nuclear power plants there really are. Look at all of the submarines and surface ships in our U.S. Navy fleet. Until we learn to harness "green" energy and the technology to make enough energy to feed the energy monster's/end users (all of us), nuclear energy is a very viable option that is probably more effecient than natural gas and/or coal energy combined.

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I am suddenly having visions of submarines equiped with solar panels :D

Bruno's point about the different designs of nuclear reactors is a good one. There are also different reactions that nuclear powerplants can use, and some create waste that has much shorter halflives. I don't recall what the current biproducts are or if the halflives of the waste are currently minimized. But my point is that there are ways in which nuclear power has become safer, and there are more ways to make it safer too. I think focusing on that, for the time being, is a better idea than trying to scrap nuclear power all together. Because another good point is what other options do we have.

The real problem isn't how we get the energy, though, it's that there are too many people using it, and they are also using too much.

Seriously, how far into the future would you guess the human race, as we know it, will continue to exist?

That will depend entirely on whether we can get off this rock as a species or not. The human species is not that old and yet we've done remarkable things.
If we can get past the point where we all kill each other, then colonization of space is a real option. At present, the solar system is a strong boundary with the technology that we have so far. Otoh, I don't doubt that we can overcome those problems, make technological advances and zoom out of here before we get hit back to the stone age by a supervulcano or killer asteroid.

That is something not all people realize. We depend on todays technology to make tomorrow's technology. If todays technology breaks down in a cataclysm, kick starting the entier industrial process again from scratch is going to take a loooong time. Think of it like this: suppose you get warped back to 1700 with your knowledge of today's math and physics. what could you do? The answer is : precious little. You could have interesting conversations with physicists and mathematicians of those days. Not much more. Because everything you could do with that knowledge requires industrial support for obtaining raw materials, energy, engineering, ....

It is my profound hope that I will live to see the day where we can power up the first craft that can take humans away from the earth to a mars colony or something similar. A community that can live independent from earth support. If we can do that, then the human species will survive in this galaxy for as long as it exists. If we can't, then it is pretty much a given that we will sooner or later become extinct.

:o

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Originally Posted by Bruno

I am suddenly having visions of submarines equiped with solar panels :D

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Hey, you laugh...but Captain Nemo could have done it!!

Thing is that there is a LOT of energy in those little reactors on subs...maybe that's the answer itself. Small versus the large ones.

there are disposable reactors available today able to supply mid sized citys for 50 years(500k people IIRC)
and they are also designed to be plased deep underground so storage is a matter of leaving it alone
Windmills still kill birds and solar power is not werry effective, methanol fuel cells are but a life span of one year cant pretend to be economic

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Originally Posted by Bruno

There are 2 important issues to keep in mind.

1) modern reactors are built to use a different type fuel and work according to different principles. It is simply impossible to get a melt down if the cooling fails because it's the coolant that makes the reaction possible. Older reactors are still the design which can go critical and which are in effect nothing more than controlled nuclear bombs.

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Sort of, but not exactly. Standard fuel for LWRs (light water reactors) is slightly enriched Uranium (~5-7% 235 IIRC), although some like CANDU reactors (they use heavy water or D2O) or RBMKs (Chernobyl's design--they use graphite as a moderator & I forget what else they do) can use natural uranium. Navy reactor fuel is enriched quite a bit more--I forget what it is.

It is very possible to melt down from decay heat well after the control rods are inserted. Eventually it cools off, but not for a while. That's what happened @ Fukushima--the operating reactors SCRAMed immediately upon feeling the tremor & shut down just fine, but the tsunami later wiped out the diesel generators that powered pumps & various other backup/emergency cooling systems. Decay heat built up & we all know the rest.

I think you're talking about water acting as a neutron moderator, where steam bubbles slow the rate of reaction--that's called a negative void coefficient--big safety feature. (Chernobyl had a very high positive void coefficient--the reaction increased in the presence of steam voids.) This only slows the reaction rate, though--it has nothing to do w/ decay heat. Melting down is a function of heat in this case.

Lastly, any fission reaction involves criticality (I think the term is delayed criticality, but I could be wrong--anyone who knows, feel free to correct me if I am)--if it's not critical, there's no chain reaction. Weapons operate under prompt supercriticality. Some newer designs don't require active safety/cooling systems, but every reactor needs to go critical to produce energy. Nuclear explosions are impossible in a power plant--the enrichment is far too low for that to ever happen even w/o any controls.

No offense whatever intended here; just wanted to clear a few things up. This whole thing has gotten me reading a lot more about nukes in general even though my area is chemicals. :D

Jimmy- There are risks and that is part of life.

And always should and probably always will be.

and I daresay I agree with Dylan. The world IS overpopulated, and it's getting worse. Nothing you can do about it, but the world can only support so much for so long safely and in a way people can enjoy being alive. At this rate, the end is coming and not far off. More, more and more is going to have to become less, less and less regardless of new technology as far as energy is concerned or the world will eventually become to small.

Nothing is green out there.
We should compare our sources?
what we have and what are we getting.
Has any of you seen how coal plants works? how much coal they use ? and how harmful it is? starting Mercury and ending up ash?
i do think safely build Nuclear plant will save a lot more lives then rest of options we have today.
Just my 0.2 cent

I have to agree with you Sham, I (our railroad anyway & me regularly) haul three trains full of coal per week to the local coal plant. That's 57,000 TONS of coal or 405 cars heaping full of it...per week, whichever is easier to grasp in the minds eye.

114,000,000 pounds of coal per week...poof, into the air for one weeks worth of energy. I think most of that energy goes to the east coast...

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Originally Posted by shooter74743

I'm ex-Navy and most folks don't realize just how many nuclear power plants there really are. Look at all of the submarines and surface ships in our U.S. Navy fleet. Until we learn to harness "green" energy and the technology to make enough energy to feed the energy monster's/end users (all of us), nuclear energy is a very viable option that is probably more effecient than natural gas and/or coal energy combined.

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I have had a feeling for awhile that nuke is the way to go, over the years there have been some major stuff ups but that is generally how we learn and I would bet that the latest crop of nuke power stations would be very safe and what is more design engineers would be much better now at anticipating potential problems. My generation here in Australia has been brought up anti nuke since the 1960's and it is only now I have been reevaluating my position. When oil is now longer affordable we will finish up with a diverse range of power sources .

cheers

Heelerau

I would be in favour of nuclear power if someone could answer the question of what to do with the nuclear waste. Also, my understanding of half life is that when nuclear waste reaches its half life in 300,000 years it is only half as deadly as it was 300,000 years ago.

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Originally Posted by ndw76

I would be in favour of nuclear power if someone could answer the question of what to do with the nuclear waste. Also, my understanding of half life is that when nuclear waste reaches its half life in 300,000 years it is only half as deadly as it was 300,000 years ago.

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Thats an easy one to answer you spread it over a very very very wide area so that its at a level of normal back ground radiation.
Just 1 catch though the cost!!!

The Bottom line is Nuclear is our only option today it is the most concentrated energy source we have and we will be using it more and more as the price of oil goes up Green energy is the future but until oil goes way over the top its still not looking cheap enough yet. Countries like Japan and France went down the Nuclear route to be less dependant on imported energy.

The Economies of the west are in a depressed state but there is money to be made and green energy is the key to getting things moving again. with China and India becoming more wealthy and buying cars hence pushing up the oil price. The oil will become too expensive and or run out that's when green energy will pay off.

Read thats potentially 2 Billion new customers with money to spend on green energy.

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Originally Posted by ndw76

I would be in favour of nuclear power if someone could answer the question of what to do with the nuclear waste.

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There are many things you can do with it, but they are pretty much the same things you do with any other waste. E.g. process it a little bit and then dump it somewhere, or dilute it until it's more palatable and live with it... May be some day it'll be cheap enough to shove it in space? Of course, nobody wants to pay for that part, the same way they don't want to pay for dealing with any other waste.

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Originally Posted by ndw76

Also, my understanding of half life is that when nuclear waste reaches its half life in 300,000 years it is only half as deadly as it was 300,000 years ago.

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Not quite. It can be just as deadly or completely undeadly depending on the specifics. Everything has a decay rate (even iron which has the lowest energy i.e. making anything else out of it costs energy, but that's what quantum mechanics would do to you) and the decay rate of most things that are not considered radioactive is just much smaller than the decay rate of say plutonium.
I've carried slow neutrons in a coffee cup across the room to run an experiment and most people would argue I'm still alive :)
Basically radiation is like most other things - it's not automatically bad for you and as long as you use it properly the benefits can outweigh the damage. Certainly most scientists who discovered how it works died prematurely of cancer.

I can't read the title of this thread without hearing it like this in my head.
http://images.icanhascheezburger.com...8775173279.jpg

Well, now you've got me hearing it like that! :rofl2: "When Putin rears his head..." ;)

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Originally Posted by gugi

May be some day it'll be cheap enough to shove it in space? Of course, nobody wants to pay for that part, the same way they don't want to pay for dealing with any other waste.

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I could be mistaken, but my understanding of why we don't launch nuclear waste into space is a safety issue, not one of cost. While sending things into space is much safer today than it has been in the past, there is still a % chance of failure. If that was to happen in our atmosphere and if the craft was carrying nuclear waste, the results would be quite bad.

I'm really saying this next bit out of speculation, but I think it would be cheaper to send nuclear waste into space than it is to create longterm storage solutions (which can't even hold the waste securely until it's at a safe level of radioactivity, though the holding period is probably much longer than the human race will survive).

well, here are some numbers:
yucca mountain is supposed to hold 70 000 tons of radioactive waste at the cost estimate of just under 100 billion USD. Which means about 1500USD/kg. Currently the cost to send payload into space depends on how far but it starts at around 15000USD and can go 3x-5x as much if it's to go to say Mars. So that's at present 10x-50x more expensive.
You figure out the overhead for safety.

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Originally Posted by Bruno

That will depend entirely on whether we can get off this rock as a species or not. The human species is not that old and yet we've done remarkable things.
If we can get past the point where we all kill each other, then colonization of space is a real option. At present, the solar system is a strong boundary with the technology that we have so far. Otoh, I don't doubt that we can overcome those problems, make technological advances and zoom out of here before we get hit back to the stone age by a supervulcano or killer asteroid.

That is something not all people realize. We depend on todays technology to make tomorrow's technology. If todays technology breaks down in a cataclysm, kick starting the entier industrial process again from scratch is going to take a loooong time. Think of it like this: suppose you get warped back to 1700 with your knowledge of today's math and physics. what could you do? The answer is : precious little. You could have interesting conversations with physicists and mathematicians of those days. Not much more. Because everything you could do with that knowledge requires industrial support for obtaining raw materials, energy, engineering, ....

It is my profound hope that I will live to see the day where we can power up the first craft that can take humans away from the earth to a mars colony or something similar. A community that can live independent from earth support. If we can do that, then the human species will survive in this galaxy for as long as it exists. If we can't, then it is pretty much a given that we will sooner or later become extinct.

:o

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Essentially, make an off-site backup of the human species. Sadly, no form of backup technology is without potential failure. What if the sun goes supernova? Then our solar system gets a whole lot less comfortable. But I digress, that's a topic for an entirely other thread.

In the case of nuclear power...what would you propose as an alternative? Coal? Wind? Solar? Natural Gas? Geothermal? Hydro-electric? Aquatic thermocline (forget the actual name)? I'm all about "going green" and minimizing our environmental impact, but with our current electricity demands as a SOCIETY, there really isn't a feasible alternative. There are MASSIVE environmental implications to each and every one of those technologies, and you can spend days arguing for or against each and every one, and be right the entire time.

The solution? Turn off your lights when you leave a room. Only charge your devices when you need to. Turn off your computer / tv / cable box when not in use. Level your fridge. In short, use less power. Even that's only a partial solution.

I'm reminded of something I read in Freakonomics (I think) about what happened to the world when the internal combustion engine finally caught on. New York City had lots, blocks, piled many stories high with horse manure left from the thousands of horses used for transportation throughout the city. There was so much, they literally couldn't get rid of it. They couldn't give it away fast enough. What happened? Did they come up with some incredible manure-disappearing solution? Nope. Someone developed the internal combustion engine, and the need for horses as a mode of transportation disappeared overnight. With no horses, there was no waste. Essentially, at this point in time, we need our version of the internal combustion engine. Something more efficient than what we have now, that uses a widely available fuel source.

...until someone perfects cold fusion, that is. Then we're set.

Anybody familiar with Thorium Reactors?