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Member (Idle past 1395 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
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Author | Topic: American Budget Cuts | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rahvin Member Posts: 4024 Joined: Member Rating: 8.8 |
Why even bother responding to a Randroid? Anyone who thinks that Atlas Shrugged is in any way relevant to reality is delusional, not to mention utterly lacking in ethics.
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4024 Joined: Member Rating: 8.8 |
Nuclear power plants I feel is a bad idea. From what I know about them, they are expensive poisonous hot water heaters that will add to our problems in the form of keeping up the maintainance and doing away with the waste. You know wrong. Nuclear power is by far the cheapest method of power generation, and modern reactors are extremely safe. Quite literally, more radiation is released by a coal burning power plant than a nuclear reactor. France produces something like 80% of their power with nuclear plants, and has for decades, without incident. Nuclear power is also just about the only way to move forward - with fossil fuel drying up and polluting so badly, with power requirements only ever rising particularly in the developing world, and with thoughts of electric cars, only nuclear power plants have an easily available, plentiful, reliable fuel source capable of keeping up with demand. Solar/wind/geothermal/wave power just don't cut it, and coal/oil/gas won't be around forever.
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4024 Joined: Member Rating: 8.8 |
According to a article in the Wall Street Journal Nuclear Power is considered to expensive and dangerous. All the "pro" points seem to be based on conjecture. The Case For and Against Nuclear Power - WSJ The article you posted is filled with inaccuracies. The "danger" of nuclear power in America is more one of public opinion than actual risk. As I said, other nations like France generate the majority of their power from nuclear reactors, have been doing so for decades, and have been doing so without incident. The "cost" of building a new reactor in the US has been due to amazingly expensive permit and approval fees. The actual cost of runing the reactor is far, far less expensive per megawatt than other methods of power generation. There are many speculative "hey, we could do this" techniques involving nuclear reactors, but some of them have not only been tried, they're currently in use today. So-called "breeder" reactors allow the reprocessing of spent fuel to continue the nuclear fuel cycle beyond a single use. This makes nuclear power even more efficient. It's used in France and other parts of the world right now...the only reason the US doesn't is because of some rather fooling nonproliferation executive orders from the 60s that didn't make sense then and make less sense now. The risks of nuclear power are tiny. Chernobyl was an ancient reactor design by today's standards, and still needed so many individual failures to happen all at once...honestly, it's almost like they had to try to fuck up so badly as to cause that disaster. Nuclear reactors do heat up the bodies of water they use to dump heat, but there are other solutions for that - and that water isn't radioactive (the water in direct contact with the reactor's radiation is kept in a closed circuit). Uranium is plentiful. There are economic ways of even retrieving fuel from sea water. There's enough fuel to power the world for decades (most estimates say centuries or more, but let's be conservative, shall we?) even at current growth rates.
I admit I do not know anything about it but what I read in the media. But from what I read it is not the way to go imo. The sad thing being it may be our only viable option. It is our only option. But even if it weren't, it's still the best option. Our current power infrastructure relies on coal, oil and gas burning. These are amazingly harmful to the environment. They are direct contributors to the greenhouse effect, cause acid rain, and as I said previously, they actually pump more radioactive material into the atmosphere than any nuclear power plant. Even if we weren't going to run out of fossil fuels, nuclear is still cheaper, cleaner and safer.
Green peace has produced a article about Frances nuclear plants. That considering the source is of course bias. But it is referenced. ...you believed what Greenpeace said about nuclear reactors? You're an idiot then. Seriously, you shouldn't trust them if they tell you the sky is blue. They're propagandists, not dealers in fact.
As far as" a coal plant releasing more radiation" is concerned, heh, tell the to the residents at Chernobyl. Oh my bad, they're all dead from radiation poisoning. Oh please. Chernobyl was the worst nuclear disaster in history, and it was an aberration. It's never happened since, anywhere. And you cannot seriously compare the radiation of a fucking meltdown with the radiation of a normal, working coal plant. Under normal operating conditions, a coal power plant pumps out more radioactive material into the atmosphere than a nuclear reactor by far. Of course, fossil plants aren't immune to disaster either. I recall a recent explosion in the San Francisco area that wiped out most of a neighborhood when a natural gas pipe went off. When was the most recent nuclear disaster of any kind, anywhere? The 80s?
The thing is the rest of the world is doing it. So it will be a matter of time before our country follows. What good is it if you are the only kid in the pool who is not dropping a turd in the water. The pool is still full of shit. Uh huh. Maybe you should try reading material on nuclear power that wasn't written by Greenpeace. That was the equivalent of having fucking Ray Comfort explain the Theory of Evolution!
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4024 Joined: Member Rating: 8.8 |
You seem to have fallen for some of the lies greenies and other lefties used to scare people into thinking nuclear power is vastly more dangerous then it actually is. For the record, Coyote, I'm a pretty hardcore liberal, and I'm also a huge supporter of nuclear power as the cheapest, cleanest, safest and most plentiful method of power generation currently available.
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4024 Joined: Member Rating: 8.8
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Where do we stand on decommissioning costs? Long term storage costs? Final waste disposal costs? These very long term issues are what have always caused the most rational concern. The major issues are political. Waste storage and disposal is crippled by two things: NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) who are irrationally terrified of having "nuclear waste" stored within 500 miles of their homes, even under a mountain The executive order against nuclear fuel reprocessing, which is based on fears with transportation, security, and proliferation. To be perfectly honest, the Cold War, combined with the near disaster of Three Mile Island and the actual disaster of Chernobyl, scared us so badly that not even demonstrable fact can overcome the public's fear of nuclear power. A few decades of popular media telling us that "nuclear waste" will either kill you, turn you into a mutant turtle, or give you superpowers probably didn't help matters. Existing and near-term technologies can already further diminish even the few real concerns. Molten salt reactors are, quite literally, meltdown-proof, as the reaction is self-limiting (if the reaction starts to get too hot, the fuel mix expands with the heat and actually winds up stopping the reaction with no action required by operators), as one example. There are even alternative fuels - thorium is even more plentiful than uranium, easier to get, and has a better fuel life cycle that results in spent fuel that decays in a few centuries rather than millions of years - not to mention bypassing weapons proliferation concerns. From Wiki:
quote: One of the hot-button scare terms these days is the so-called "dirty bomb," which basically involves using a conventional explosive to disperse radioactive material over a large area. The intent of course is supposedly to use radiation sickness rather than an actual nuclear weapon as the killer. Of course, dispersing the nuclear material over a large area means that it becomes much less dangerous; the more dispersed, the less dangerous. Radioactive material exists in varying quantities all around us; uranium used to be used to coat pottery of all things, and even kitty litter is slightly radioactive. The threat of a "dirty bomb" is almost entirely the fear that the concept creates rather than the effectiveness of such a weapon. You could kill more people with an Uzi in a shopping mall, but radiation is more scary. Transportation of nuclear fuel (including reprocessing) is also a source of irrational fear. The casks used to transport nuclear material are designed (and tested) to withstand being struck by a freight train while burning in jet fuel (not kidding) without a breach. In any accident, you'd be more likely to be hurt by having the cask roll over you and crush you than any sort of radiological threat. Theft isn't particularly a concern either. We transport more valuable and more dangerous substances all the time, without fear. You can;t just steal some spent fuel rods and make a "suitcase nuke;" it just doesn't work that way. Even if you could get your hands on the right fissile material for making a bomb, you still need significantly complicated and specific processing and manufacturing facilities as well as specific engineering knowledge to be able to put it all together. This is a job for governments, not terrorists, and the one wonderful thing about nuclear proliferation is that governments at least are absolutely terrified to press the button, because Mutually Assured Destruction is a no-win game. The only threat with regard to nuclear weapons is to have an actual nuclear weapon stolen, which is completely irrelevant to nuclear power generation. Nuclear reprocessing attacks basically every issue from multiple vectors: by reprocessing fuel, you get a lot more power out of every kilogram of fuel. Using less fuel means less waste...and reprocessed waste is also less dangerous! Again from Wiki:
quote: The fears over nuclear power are irrational, driven by idiots like Greenpeace and frightened lay NIMBYs, and now terrorism hysteria. The simple fact is that nuclear power harms the environment far less than coal, oil, solar, and hydroelectric generation, is more reliable than hydro, solar, wind, or wave, can be used in more areas than solar, wind, hydro, wave, and geothermal, has enough easily-retrievable fuel to account for even modern energy usage growth far into the future...I can go on here. If we could overcome the stigma against nuclear power, we could solve the energy crisis within a matter of decades (they do take a little while to build, after all). A set of standardized reactor designs could cut the building costs (as well as permits) significantly. There have even been small, community-sized reactors designed for mass production. They're the size of a single-wide trailer roughly, can power a medium sized community by itself for a period of a few years, the fuel is inaccessible without specialized tools and isn't weapons-grade anyway, and you basically just send it back to the manufacturer to have the fuel restocked when necessary. Can you imagine the effectiveness of that kind of power generation in disaster-struck areas like Haiti? Plentiful power available within just a few days? Aside from the molten-salt reactors, everything I've talked about is available right now, not tomorrow. Most of it is already widely in use in other countries, like France. With fossil fuel reaching its peak, we need to start the switch to nuclear now...unless someone designs a working, net-positive fusion generator tomorrow, fission is the way of the future.
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4024 Joined: Member Rating: 8.8 |
And that wind/solar and wave technology is cleaner. Are you aware of the environmental harm caused by the manufacture of semiconductors, particularly large semiconductors like solar power cells on the scale of commercial power production?
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4024 Joined: Member Rating: 8.8 |
No I was not aware of the environmental harm caused by making semiconductors. But I can almost guess they are being made in China lol. I know, I know thats not the point. But your NIMBY comment earlier was spot on. Have a great week end. Semiconductor manufacture involves chemical etching of silicon with some rather nasty stuff. This applies to basically any semiconductor, including computer components. There are ways to clean up the process, and lots of factories use them, like the Intel and AMD plants here in the states. But you're right: lots and lots and lots of solar cells are made in China, and they largely just don't care. Solar is great, and even considering a poor manufacturing process, it still beats the pants off of fossil fuels (mining/drilling for fossil fuels is horrible for the environment, and that's before refinement and actual power production). It very easily allows for better decentralization of the power grid, can easily be installed in rural areas, etc, and the only to real downsides are that solar cells aren't particularly efficient and they're dependent on clear line-of-sight to the Sun. I still wouldn't mind seeing solar cells on most rooftops and solar power plants wherever feasible, but there just isn't any way they can keep up with our power demands, even including wind and wave and geothermal into the grid. The developed and developing worlds are power hungry. Nuclear, by contrast, is extremely clean. When disaster strikes, it's bad, but there has been exactly one significant nuclear disaster, and it involved purposefully trying to test the system by bypassing over a dozen safety mechanisms, and it occurred almost three decades ago. Nuclear power is used in many nations, in some cases even providing more electricity than any other source, without incident. The actual evidence is that a scant few dozen people have ever been killed and just a few hundred injured in a nuclear power plant disaster, while thousands of people work in them every day, and millions receive electricity from them without incident. Contrary to the Simpsons, nuclear plants don;t make fish grow three eyes, don't pump toxic sludge into water supplies, don't make you glow in the dark, and won't give you cancer whether you work in one or live nearby. New fossil fuel recovery techniques, on the other hand, have grown more and more desperate as supplies of easily accessible fuels dry up - just look at the Gulf oil spill. Even another Chernobyl couldn't manage the amount of damage that disaster caused (life in Chernobyl, by the way, has actually re-surged. It still wouldn't be a good idea for humans to live there, but visits are fine, and plants and animals are flourishing in the absence of civilization). What's lacking for nuclear to take over the energy industry is not safety or security. It's political will. Collectively we have an irrational fear of nuclear power - we consider radiation to be more frightening than natural gas explosions or coal fires (a coal fire in the US has been burning since 1962!) even when we can objectively show that the risk is far lower.
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4024 Joined: Member Rating: 8.8 |
Your link says "toxic waste." It does not say "nuclear waste." There is a rather large difference between the two - one of them being that "toxic waste" is an awfully broad term of which nuclear waste is a tiny, itty bitty subset.
In fact, that's how I know your information is bullshit:
Since beginning operations, France's La Hague plant has safely processed over 23,000 tones of used fuel--enough to power France for fourteen years. From here, in a discussion of the single reprocessing facility that handles all of France's nuclear waste. 1.9 million cubic meters/year?! What are you smoking?! Do you have any idea how much uranium it would take to fill that?! Uranium has a density of over 19 metric tons per cubic meter! You're very, very obviously conflating "toxic waste" with "nuclear waste." I suggest you stop doing that, as it makes you very, very wrong. The 23,000 tons of waste that could fuel France for 14 years, by the way, would then occupy only a paltry 1210 cubic meters of volume. That's rather smaller than 1.9 million. And that's for 14 years, which works out to about 86 cubic meters per year. For the entire world, from here: quote: Where did you get your info? Greenpeace?
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