Hmmm...in the other thread, someone made the comment that the sun is going to burn out in a few billion years, so we can't count on it as an energy source. Hopefully that was sarcasm and I just missed it, but in case it wasn't: I hate to spoil the ending, but eventually the universe is going to end up a wasteland of useless heat...entropy is a b_i_t_c_h. :P
Back on topic: I think the U.S. should build the heck out of nuclear reactors. Discuss. :)
I hate to spoil the ending, but eventually the universe is going to end up a wasteland of useless heat...entropy is a b_i_t_c_h.
But enthalpy shall marshall its forces in local areas; THUS THE BIG BANG!!
Build a Dyson sphere. Seriously, we need a Dyson sphere.
It's kind of a White Stripes day for me.
I am an energy creating machine! The only downside is the waste gases, solids, and liquids...
What happens when an earthquake eventually hits a nuclear reactor? IF the cooling system goes down I am not so sure emergency cooling works that well. Condoms can help energy in the future by making there be less people and with the same energy demand use less energy.
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Build a Dyson sphere. Seriously, we need a Dyson sphere.It might be more productive to keep to things that we can actually come up with some engineering for. Theory is fine, but the engineering is what gets done.
Besides, RingWorld over Dyson Sphere any day of the week.
But ringworlds are unstable.
Back to the original topic. To leading order, you can treat power demand in an industrialized area as the sum of three components: a constant (well, it tends to have a seasonal variation, but it's approximately constant from day to day), a component which varies on a daily cycle (with some variation depending on weekday vs. weekend), and a random/rapidly varying component. Big nuke plants and big coal plants are good for that constant component, and are also the least expensive per kWh. Smaller coal plants do OK for the daily cycle, and gas turbines are very good for the random stuff. To make things like wind or solar work well, there has to be an efficient power storage mechanism to balance things out. Or a hella efficient, fast-responding power grid to balance supply and demand across a wide area. (Once you have that storage mechanism, btw, you can use it to eliminate the cyclic component plants, by ramping up your base load generation and storing it during the low-demand part of the cycle, then running the increased demand off of the batteries.)
My personal preference for solar is to use it on a local area or household level to charge electric vehicles, decentralizing storage to people's cars. But that's just me.
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The best solution would probably be decentralized solar power networked in a world wide smart grid. There have already been some tests of paving sidewalks and driveways with photovoltaic materials, and the really ambitious efforts are looking at integrating solar into all roads. Even without the roads if you covered roofs, sidewalks, and driveways then most neighborhoods would produce enough electricity to meet local demand... include the roads and we'd have more than double what we use currently. With no additional land usage. Make the grid big and efficient enough and the intermittent nature of surface sunlight becomes irrelevant... the Sun is always shining somewhere.
That said, the most likely solution is decreasing coal and petroleum being replaced with increasing natural gas, nuclear, and centralized renewable (mostly solar and wind). This approach will allow power companies to continue gouging consumers as much as possible for a long time to come.
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Re waste management, yes and no. Spent nuclear fuel from current reactors can be separated into the high radioactivity/short half-life waste products (after a few years, that's mainly Sr-90 and Cs-137, both of which have half-lives ~30 years, give or take), the transuranic waste products (which can be "burned" in an accelerator), and the uranium/plutonium. That sort of separation is a mature technology; the problem with it in its current form is that IIRC one of the outputs is high-purity plutonium. Yes, it can be used as a reactor fuel. It's also a significant proliferation risk. There's a chemical separation method that basically keeps the uranium and plutonium together such that the output is mixed U/Pu oxides that can be used as reactor fuel, but I'm not sure how the scaling works with that.
tl,dr: The fuel isn't that much of a problem.
OTOH, the reactor buildings, the pressure vessel, the primary coolant loop--when a reactor is decommissioned, there's a huge amount of radioactive material to deal with, ranging from mildly unpleasant to screaming hot. Granted, the screaming hot stuff (cobalt-60 in the steel) has a half-life less than 6 years, so after a century there won't be much left, but you still have the problem of stewardship. Can we rely on those buildings sitting untouched for a century while the radioactive components decay? Or do we tear them down and transport them to a place like the Nevada Test Site (or whatever it's called these days) where they can sit and decay for a century? Decommissioning the reactors at Hanford was an incredible project, and it'd have to be done for every reactor out there.
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The normal fission plants were never meant to be all of the nuclear energy grid. The other half was the breeder plants and other pieces that would extend the fuel cycle by several orders of magnitude. Today, people are complaining that making more nuclear plants is only a short term solution because there is not enough fuel... Go figure.
Next up comes the arguments about safety. Fact is, not many power plants were made for some 30 years or so, and most of the old ones are really pretty old by now. For safety to work, you would need to update the technology, not just use the old crap you already have. And when plants built to spec and properly maintained have been involved in accidents, they have held up wonderfully. Tjernobyl, well, considering the soviets couldn't supply maintenance and education enough to handle anything else properly, why should it surprise anyone that they f~%#ed this up?
It's well past time to put in a honest and proper discussion about nuclear energy, hopefully this time we can ignore the bleating masses who think everything nuclear is bad, and judge the possibilities that exist today with unbiased eyes.
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Probably not Nevada, possibly, but uncertain, WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant). That is where we are shipping the TRU waste now (Transuranic). Google WIPP
I'm passingly familiar with WIPP, and they're not AFAIK set up to accept civilian reactor waste. Getting them to take actual pieces of spent fuel instead of just the drums of incidentally TRU-contaminated items that we'd been shipping them for twenty or so years took some doing.
Today, people are complaining that making more nuclear plants is only a short term solution because there is not enough fuel... Go figure.
I haven't heard that particular argument at all; do you have a cite? Closing the fuel cycle is a good idea for waste minimization, but with the amount of uranium we have currently available my understanding is that the fuel supply is not an issue. At least, that's what I got from a talk by a guy named Pete* Miller, who used to be the DOE Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy.
*I don't know why he goes by Pete; his name is actually Warren F Miller.
Well, in Sweden it's a common enough argument from the wind and solar-only crowd, who dislike anything remotely efficient regarding energy production.
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Sissyl: The argument makes a bit more sense when you have to import your uranium; I can see not wanting to make your energy economy completely dependent on foreign suppliers. The US is something of an object lesson in how foreign policy winds up hostage to energy imports. Besides, the coastal winds in Sweden could potentially make you a net exporter of electricity--no bad thing.
Edited to make it clearer who I was replying to; when I started, Terquem's post hadn't yet appeared.
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I haven't read every comment on here, but I'd like to add my 2cp:
I don't think there's a single miracle solution. Which is to say that the best solution to sustainable energy is diversified energy production. Live near a big river? Hydroelectric. Live near geothermal vents? Awesome. Solar/wind as a general consensus baseline, but decentralized. Neighborhood solar "plants"/farms. I've seen some other far fetched solutions, but if it can be made economically viable then do that too!
Despite my often environmentalist bent, I think nuclear has to be part of the equation as well, at least as a stopgap.
We're not likely to be weaned off oil in the near future, even if 100% sustainable energy was achieved tomorrow, because of all the consumer products made by the petrochemical industry. Coal, however, can definitely be obviated as a fuel source.
I'm PRO Energy Production, and I am PRO Energy Consumption.
Carry on.
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... or just reduce the world population back down to, say, half a billion -- we had no worries about pollution and resource scarcity when the footprint was that much smaller. Maybe introduce a universal contraceptive into every water supply on Earth, and add the antidote after 50 years.
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I've got to agree with meatrace that one cannot make a legitimate argument that a single energy source will be the "solution". We (the collective "we", as in planet-wide) should be investigating any potential energy source.
One other thing to consider is that as far as energy production goes, it does not need to be of the type that runs through the grid or powers any other thing. Passive solar collectors, even low tech options, can have an impact on overall energy consumption by supplementing or even replacing traditional energy use for the same purpose.
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High-Tc oxide superconductors are still under investigation, but they won't be used for conventional wiring--too expensive to keep cooled. I remember some research into extremely high-voltage DC power transmission for low loss over long distances; that was in the context of running solar farms in Northern Africa for European markets.
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So stop having kids and kill most of the population of the planet? That is the answer to the global energy crisis. Wow I could so pull a Godwin right now, it just would be way too easy.
No, no one is saying kill most of the planet. They're saying reduce the population. Through disincentivizing reproduction, among other things. It may not be pleasant, but our current technological and geo-political paradigm cannot sustain the current population, let along unchecked population growth. At some point you may just have to not treat a disease or two.
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Its not women having 10 children that's the problem. More than three is going to be a problem (assuming the third child makes up for gays, early death, infertility, etc.). We're not that far away from two being a problem (especially when you factor in the fact that our government refuses to get some courage and do something about restricting immigration).
I'm not terribly interested in starting an immigration debate, Citizen Duck, but how is keeping the starving, wretched masses out of our borders going to stop the worldwide population increase?
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Education, access to birth control and empowerment of women lead directly to lower birth rates.
And they're the right thing to do anyway.
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Continuing the digression, for a moment.
Its not women having 10 children that's the problem. More than three is going to be a problem (assuming the third child makes up for gays, early death, infertility, etc.). We're not that far away from two being a problem (especially when you factor in the fact that our government refuses to get some courage and do something about restricting immigration).
More to the point, talk of Third World overpopulation by those of us in the developed world smacks of concern trollery. The environmental impact of the average US citizen, e.g., is something like an order of magnitude greater than that of the average Third Worlder. If we're grousing about the problems caused by having ten kids in a largely preindustrial nation somewhere, well, we should also be complaining just as loudly about families with more than *one* kid in the US. Besides, worldwide birth rates are trending down (even in Islamic countries, which is kind of interesting in its own right). Yes, population is increasing, but if the current trends hold it'll level off somewhere around 2060-2080 and start gradually dropping.