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The New Atomic Age We Need

nytimes.com

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Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#151

Post by andbberger »

Pietertje wrote: post #149

Does somebody know if nuclear power will actually be an improvement for the environment (only considering temperature here)? Essentially you just release heat which is stored as mass. A quick calculation shows that if you only consider heating up our atmosphere and assume an entire switch of all our energy consumption to nuclear energy you end up with a temperature rise of 0.1 deg C per year. I know it is a worst-cas…

All energy sources carry the same essential thermodynamic burden. The difference is that nuclear doesn't also emit green house gases.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#152

Post by fleitz »

legulere wrote: post #30
Amorymeltzer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but don't discount the FUD. Much as people fear an airplane crash more than a car crash, the prospect of nuclear power is far more terrifying to most than just another coal plant. It's not enough that the coal plant is orders of magnitude more deadly, it's the perception. Even the image the NYT used will convey to many a disregard for life, pumping harmful radiation into our environment, rather than merel…

I think the big fear of nuclear power is because we don't know how to handle catastrophic risks. With coal power you will have a few dead mine workers. It's only mine workers that are affected and they have a definite risk in front of their eyes. You can rise the worker protection regulations for making this safer. You have the problem of air pollution through fine particles and sulfur. You can solve this with filter…

Let's put it this way, most coal plants release so much nuclear waste that if you could capture the uranium and thorium released you could generate more power with it than the coal it came from.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#153

Post by hguant »

Pietertje wrote: post #149

Does somebody know if nuclear power will actually be an improvement for the environment (only considering temperature here)? Essentially you just release heat which is stored as mass. A quick calculation shows that if you only consider heating up our atmosphere and assume an entire switch of all our energy consumption to nuclear energy you end up with a temperature rise of 0.1 deg C per year. I know it is a worst-cas…

Greenhouse gases matter. The heat generated by power plants etc is irrelevant.

Venus and Earth receive (very roughly) similar amounts of sunlight. They generate similar amounts of heat through radioactive decay in their core. The reason Venus is a hellhole and Earth is, well, Earth - greenhouse gasses.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#154

Post by fleitz »

madaxe_again wrote: post #141
ScottBurson wrote: post #124

I'm in the middle of reading a great book on geoengineering, Oliver Morton's The Planet Remade . Engagingly written and comprehensive; I recommend it highly. From the introduction: If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants (at present, the world builds about thr…

I'd actually say that delivering one large power station per week is a fairly unambitious goal, and that if the will were there, globally, dozens of plants could be onlined per day . That said, uranium is a finite resource, and even if we built all of these plants we'd be looking at peak uranium in the not too distant future. Therefore, either we go for thorium, which is looking increasingly promising, or as you say…

Everything is a finite resource, the sun isn't going to last forever either.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#155

Post by fleitz »

Simorgh wrote: post #140
ScottBurson wrote: post #124

I'm in the middle of reading a great book on geoengineering, Oliver Morton's The Planet Remade . Engagingly written and comprehensive; I recommend it highly. From the introduction: If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants (at present, the world builds about thr…

The Economist just recently published an article on geoengineering. If you read between the lines it's actually very scary stuff. Some academics, notably Chomsky, openly talk about the extinction of our species as a plausible outcome of global warming. I asked him about geoengineering. He just said, 'it seems hazardous.' http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21678963-man-ma...

This is why I can't stand talking to most enviros they claim on one hand that cc will end humanity and then claim geoengineering is too dangerous...

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#156

Post by fleitz »

mronge wrote: post #77

How does this compare to what Elon Musk says about solar power? In this presentation he shows that a reasonable amount of area could power the entire US (if we used roof tops etc for solar panels). Is that not feasible? https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187

Not if you live outside the sunbelt. Distribution of electricity is hardly free

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#157

Post by bryanh »

mightybyte wrote: post #148
tokipin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the obvious solution is batteries, which improve all sources of power generation including traditional ones by serving as support during peak times. in principle you only need stored per house during night time, which may be a much lower bar than it sounds. if the utilities serve a role later it may just be them acting as high-volume energy storage facilities, but even that might not really be necessary if individual…

Batteries aren't the only solution here. Any kind of efficient energy storage will work. For example LightSail Energy has been working on compressed air storage for several years now.

There is another interesting class of power storage called "pumped-storage hydroelectricity" [1] - for example - there is one in use in Missouri that actually burst in 2005 [2]. Li-ion batteries have a round-trip efficiency of 80-90% - pumped-storage has ~70-80%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#158

Post by Pietertje »

andbberger wrote: post #151
Pietertje wrote: post #149

Does somebody know if nuclear power will actually be an improvement for the environment (only considering temperature here)? Essentially you just release heat which is stored as mass. A quick calculation shows that if you only consider heating up our atmosphere and assume an entire switch of all our energy consumption to nuclear energy you end up with a temperature rise of 0.1 deg C per year. I know it is a worst-cas…

All energy sources carry the same essential thermodynamic burden. The difference is that nuclear doesn't also emit green house gases.

I highly doubt your first statement. Solar, for example, is no burden since if you do nothing it would land on earth anyway.

For fossil fuels you release chemically stored energy as heat. The same applies for nuclear power. Which is an additional thermodynamic burden...

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#159

Post by hguant »

olau wrote: post #133
merpnderp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This times one hundred. Nuclear in the West is far more expensive than places like China and Vietnam not because western plants are better or safer but because they face incredible legal and regulatory hurdles designed to appease people's irrational fears.

I call bullshit on that. Nuclear safety is not to be taken lightly. The reason we haven't had more disasters than we've currently had is precisely because people working in the field take this stuff deeply seriously. And they need to. What's killing nuclear isn't environmentalists, it's that this stuff is hard, really hard, and it's getting harder over time as more failure scenarios are known.

We haven't really had any disasters, compared to the damage coal and oil do to our environment, and also compared to the semi-regular industrial accidents that happen in the coal/oil industry.

Three Mile Island - how many fatalities? Fukushima - who died? Chernobyl - there should be a Godwin's law about this.

Meanwhile, life expectancy is down, coal fired plants are quite literally poisoning our atmosphere, and oil explosions and accidents kill more people in a decade than nuclear power has over its existence (nuclear power, not nuclear weaponry. Though that's an interesting question - how many people were killed in fire bombings or by fuel-air weapons vs by nukes?)

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#160

Post by danbruc »

Pietertje wrote: post #149

Does somebody know if nuclear power will actually be an improvement for the environment (only considering temperature here)? Essentially you just release heat which is stored as mass. A quick calculation shows that if you only consider heating up our atmosphere and assume an entire switch of all our energy consumption to nuclear energy you end up with a temperature rise of 0.1 deg C per year. I know it is a worst-cas…

Not an expert but the temperature of the earth is the equilibrium temperature between the amount of energy received and the amount of energy emitted into space. Human energy consumption is four order of magnitude smaller than the energy received from the sun, so the anthropic effect is not really important. Greenhouse gases on the other hand have a significant effect because they prevent radiating a fraction of all the energy, no matter whether received from the sun our set free by human activity.
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