nuclear power

My mom is a high school science teacher. One of her recent assignments was for her advanced chemistry students to write a paper about nuclear energy. They were supposed to take a stance on whether they were for or against the use of nuclear power and then support their decision with both fact and opinion. The outcome was about 50% for and 50% against. How do people here feel about using nuclear power? France seems to be having no problems with it, and sometimes I wonder if we'd be better off to follow suit?

 

I am VERY much in support of nuclear power. It's cleaner than coal/oil, and isn't subject to price fluctuations based on the whims of Arab dictators. Contrary to popular belief, the risks are very small, and if built in an isolated area there would be very little risk to human life (certainly less than with coal power).

 

Nuclear power is a terrible idea. There ARE major risks just in operating it (mechanical/technological failure, terrorism, etc), and when you're done, what the hell do you do with the waste? Bury it in a mountain? It will be radioactive for billions of years. We poison the earth enough as it is, if we want clean energy, we're going to have to do better than this, because it is NOT clean. Clean during production, sure, but there is toxic waste produced (just not immediately).

 

I work on nuclear power stations occassionally in my engineering job. Nuclear is the cleanest method. As long as the waste is stored safely its fine. The amount of energy created from one tonnes worth of waste is incredibly high comapred to any other source. The only other viable option is wind power....but now that is being implemented in britain everyones complaining it doesn't look nice! There is no winning with people. I say yes to nuclear, just yes to more care of waste. Here in the UK its very safe and easy to store with no real problems of space, but places like russia where they are more lax with security and safety i worry.

 

You're right about the risk of mechanical failure (which is almost always the fault of the Homer Simpsons of the world, rather than the machines themselves). However, certain safeguards can be put in place to eliminate most of these worries. France is a great example.

Yes. That's certainly safer than putting tons of smog into the environment, a la coal power.

So? It's buried in a mountain.
(And not that it really matters for the sake of this debate, but just FYI your timetable is a bit off...it's radioactive for a few ten thousand years)

Nuclear power would almost certainly be an improvement from the current methods of energy production. No, it's not perfect, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

Eventually, when we have nuclear fusion instead of nuclear fission, we'll have truly 100% safe, 100% clean energy production. The more we research and support nuclear technology now, the sooner that can become a reality.

 

Kandahar,

Do you think that nuclear energy would be affordable without the massive subsidies it has always required?

 

Maybe not NOW, but 10-20 years from now? Absolutely, there's no doubt in my mind.

 

You're right, I was thinking of uranium (half life 723 million years). Plutonium (nuclear waste) has a half life of around 25,000 years (though some isotopes are for hundreds of thousands of years, and some only a few centuries). And depleted uranium has a half life of 4.5 billion years (though is not as toxic as plutonium). But our containment systems are not nearly as long lasting, many are already showing cracks/structural problems. Under a mountain would obviously be safer, but who can say what might happen to it.

And anyways, the dangers of a working plant alone should be enough cause for alarm. Chernobyl and the 3 Mile Island scare are good examples.

 

Would you say the same for renewable energy sources like wind, solar, geothermal, biodiesel, etc? I have to wonder if these might already be in widespread use if they'd been subsidized as heavily as fossil fuels and nuclear power have been for so many decades.

 

The U.S. has not built a nuclear plant since '79, maybe, just maybe, the technology has improved since then? Not to mention people are so terrified of it, think about how strict the regulations and such will be? And as far as waste there is great potential for it to be recycled, the current proccesing of it uses only about 5% of it's potential energy. I think nuclear power is a great idea, it has plenty of room for imporvement, and and it is becoming much more efficient, regardless of no new plants having been built in the U.S. the nuclear energy output has increased fairly considerably.

 

It's possible. Wind power is very common in the strip between North Dakota and northern Texas, partly because the state governments subsidize the industries. While I'm usually against government funding of industries, it does seem to drive the technology forward.

I would think the same would be true of solar power, which will also become quite prevalent in the coming decades. I don't really know enough about geothermal or biodiesel energy to say.

 

The newer "pebble bed" reactor designs seem to have promise as far as reducing the hazards from the plants themselves (they are inherently incapable of a "meltdown"), but until a real long-term solution to waste storage/isolation can be devised, I tend to lean against wider adoption of nuclear fission power. And nobody seems to acknowledge that fissionable material is a finite resource just like fossil fuels, and if we started building scores of new reactors, we will be running out of uranium just like we are running out of oil!

The other problem that needs to be dealt with is the nature of any for-profit energy generation scheme, nuclear or non-nuclear. Eventually, in the name of increasing profits, corners get cut in areas that don't immediately produce profit, like safety and maintenance. As long as the plants are built and operated with profits as the primary motive, this shit is going to happen. And when energy companies are run by bean-counters and bankers rather than engineers, the process tends to accelerate out of control. Cutting corners is bad enough at a conventional power plant, but when you are dealing with a nuclear reactor, it is intolerable.

 

Hmm I see nuclear as more of an intermediate solution, just something to hold us over until a better source can be found. As far as wind power, that just doesn't have the scalability to be a large source of energy.

 

If we switched to nuclear power, we'd only need to use fission for about 20 years. Nuclear fusion should become profitable by the mid-2020s. Once we switch to fusion, the only raw material we'll need is water (or other hydrogen compounds)...which is for all intents and purposes an inexhaustible resource. We'll never have to worry about uranium or plutonium again, and nuclear fusion plants would be 100% free from the risk of meltdown.

 

Yep, and that would lead the way to virtually limitless clean energy.

 

But they have been promising fusion power is "just around the corner" for the last 50 years or so...

 

There are two entirely different forms of nuclear energy.

Theres conventional fission and there is fusion, I support both,

however, fusion is still in research phases, and altogether, fusion is perfect energy.

It doesn't need any dangerous radioactive elements like uranium, only an isotope of hydrogen called Deuterium, and thus requires no weapons grade matireals, so theres no chance for sabatoge, and most importantly, there is absolutely no possibility of nuclear runaway, resulting in an incident like Chernoyl. This fuel cycle is tremendoudly effecient, and can produce energy to sustain the entire planet, and although it may be hard to believe, may be the most enviormentally friendly way to produce energy.

A multi-national team constructing the IETR, (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor)

Physicists have already built reactors that can achieve fusion, but none has yet produced more energy than it consumes.

If all goes as planned, ITER will change that. By building a bigger, more powerful reactor, scientists hope to produce 500 megawatts of power from just 50 megawatts input. Fuel in the form of the hydrogen isotope deuterium is extracted from water, and the small amount of radioactive waste it yields decays to a safe level in decades.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1573450.stm
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,20967,1021090,00.html

No CO2 release, almost no radioactive matireal which decays in a couple decades, incredible amounts of energy, and no chance of a meltdown.

Fusion is perfect energy.

 

Fission requires hard to get chemicals such as uranium-235 and produces quite a bit of radioactive material... soulless chaos posted something a little while ago about how to recycle much of the waste, to make the process much more effecient and produce much less waste.

Theres also the possibility of meltdown and terrorism, but I think this is a fairly low risk, three mile island was contained pretty quickely, and didn't cause many ecological problems, and even though chernobyl was bad, only about 30 people died, and only a relativly small area was damaged.

Its not pretty, but the process can be done much safer today, if fission were carried out in a remote area, and it was properly inspected, I think its still very benificial.

the IETR may not complete its project till 2060, and fission will remain a viable alternative to fossil fuel.

But once fusion power becomes possible, I don't see much use for fission energy.

 

The scientists who have been promising that needed to learn something about economics.

While fusion is physically possible today, it isn't economically profitable yet. With energy costs falling drastically over the long term, it'll become a profitable industry by 2030, and possibly earlier than that.

 

Fusion power has been available for some time, but the problem thus far has been that the massive amounts of energy needed to generate an electro-magnetic field to contain the fusion reaction, has been equal to the amount of energy.

This doesn't make sense from an economica standpoint, the energy you get out, has to be greater then the energy you put in.

But new research is showing lithium walls in zero recycling conditions at the edge of magnetic fusion devices can drastically reduce the amount of energy needed to sustain such a reaction, this in combination with a larger reactor, will make this a very attractive form of energy.