I was watching the teev as I often do, and I noticed a few "commercials" that I had never seen... As I often do.
But these ads seemed different.
One of them began with a young girl, probably about 11 or so, saying that "Children are better with technology with their parents".
Okay, I accept that.
"Like, by the time I'm older, we'll have pollution free coal power plants."
Oh, I get it. That's why children are better than their parents. Because they'll be the ones who learn how to burn coal without producing pollution.
"And that includes green-house gasses."
This line is necessary otherwise we might not know why we don't want air pollution.
I saw another one, a few days later.
A young girl, even younger than the one in the first commercial, is sitting on her couch reading a book, when she looks at the camera and says:
"Did you know that there's more coal in the United States than there is oil in the Middle-East?"
No. I did not know that. Maybe we do, but if we do, I did not know that.Neat.
I don't doubt that claim, either. But I don't think that coal is the kind of fossil fuel that we put in our car, and it is not quite as useful, for that reason. I'm sure we could easily develop a coal burning automobile. But I don't have one, and neither does any other American that I've met, so having coal doesn't answer that whole gasoline issue.
But, uh more coal in the US than oil in the Middle-East.
Did you guys know that? You can learn this fun fact and more at [url=http://www.learnaboutcoal.org]learnaboutcoal.org[/url], a totally independant source for information on the coal industry in the United States.
When you can use coal as an industrial lubricant, I'll be impressed. Untiulk then, its just idiocy.
Nuklear power is still the safest and most viable fuel source known to man.
It's still polluting, with a waste product no-one's figured out what to do with, and hideously expensive, though. Not to mention completely impractical for smaller and less industrialised nations without the high levels of infrastructure and human capital to keep it running safely. I swear, if the hundreds of billions of dollars of money that've been thrown at nuclear and petroleum over the last 4 or so decades, got thrown the way of renewables instead, we wouldn't be having this energy crisis right now.
As it is, we're stuck at this late hour trying to advance those industries from the "Model-T" stage as quickly as possible....
Feion: Coal can, inefficiently, be converted into an ersatz oil product. Germany did it during World War 1.
The nuclear waste can be stored, but the waste from petroleum products can only go up. Besides, an eraser-sized peice of fuel-grade urainium contains the same power-producing capacity as 1 tonne of coal.
What we really ought to do is build huge solar plants in our deserts. It's extremely low cost, no emission, renewable energy. Granted, something would have to be done at night and in cloudy weather, but it can help.
Is that why all the European countries are trying to move away from nuclear, too?
Nuclear is not renewable, but it is not polluting the air we breathe. Once the uranium is used up, we just gotta bury it in lead cases for a few millenia, and as long as they don't break open with people standing around, no one is real danger.
However, I do feel that there alternatives to any non-renewable energy source. Research Geothermal energy, and you'll see what I mean. Wind and hydroelectric power are the best, but aren't available in all places. Geothermal is a much adaptive means of generating large quantities of electricity.
You can't dismiss the storage problem so glibly. The inability to store it, and the risk of contamination, is a massive issue no-one's found a solution to. Where do you put massive quantities of nuclear material that needs to be kept safe? Where do you get the political, institutional and geological stability to ensure the sites are kept safe and secure for millenia?
Putting aside the problems with contamination and waste storage for a second, I wanan address this notion of safety and infallability of nuke plants. It's bollocks. We have seen time and time again that human error has made even the advanced nations' nuclear programmes fallable. The fact that we've only had a couple of disasters in 40 years is no guarantee of anything... when you're talking about great reliance on nuclear power (the world's present energy needs would require hundreds if not thousands of new plants in all different countries) and a time frame of 100s of years of operation, any non-zero probability for catastrophe becomes a huge risk. Sure, the risk of meltdown is remote, but even if it's a gun to our head with a thousand empty chambers and one bullet, enough rounds of Russian Roulette are going to kill us eventually.
Then there's the weapons issue, which I don't think I need to elaborate on.
Back to waste. We haven't found a single good way of getting rid of high-level nuclear waste. Japan stores its waste in abandoned boats floating in the ocean, Russia has been caught dumping plutonium directly into the oceans, countries in Europe are closing down nuclear power plants until the storage issue is resolved. There've been cases of contamination due to [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi
E85 is a good source of energy. it doesn't release any poluttant and smellls like popcorn when you burn it. it's pretty much corn whiskey, all they do is add a poisonous chemical so people don't drink it.
Yeah, great. Y'all gonna take [I]everyone's waste? Especially when we start building new plants by the hundreds and thousands because "the nuclear option" is so dang great? And even then, can you guarantee foolproof storage and foolproof security procedures for ten thousand years? Nope.
its great as a bridge. its not a permanent solution. It can buy us time while more stuff if worked on.
Once America volunteers to take Japanese and Russian and German and British and French nuclear waste as well (countries that either don't have the security or the vast empty geologically stable regions to get rid of the stuff with a modicum of safety), then you might have a case. Until then, increasing our reliance on nuclear to escape climate change is absolutely a devil's bargain. It would be an act of defeat and desperation to lump for nuclear at the moment.
Especially when the more plants you have, the greater the chance of meltdown. And the more you have, the greater the chance for uncontrolled weapons proliferation.
The thing is, guys, the fossil fuel situation isn't that dire yet. The figures quoted are usually only about crude oil production, when there's numerous other sources that can augment/replaceme this in the medium term. We've probably got about 50 years to move to a post-oil economy. A LOT of more difficult-to-extract fossil fuels such as tar sands are accessible and cost-effective when oil prices are higher. Tar sands, for example, are plentiful at the moment but not cost-effective to extract at a return of less than 80 dollars a barrel. Similar with ethanol (though corn based biofuel is imperfect and basically the product of domestif farm subsidies and lobby groups... you'd be better off dropping trade barriers to much more efficient sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil).
We have time, thanks to high oil costs and these other sources of hydrocarbons, to be throwing tonnes of money into alternative energy sources rather than lumping for nuclear by default just because it's the most powerful energy production source that is viable (well, viable with massive subsidies and heavy security and monitoring and so forth) today.
We're not that far off the technologies needed to move to large scale alternative energy production. Many places already do it with things like geothermal and hydroelectric. The money that would be required to build hundreds of new nuclear plants and store the waste (that's BILLIONS of dollars of government money, folks), would be better used in this manner.
Obviously there's still the global warming question, but I'll say simply that there's ways to discourage emissions while not throwing out fossil fuels wholesale tomorrow. We need things like carbon trading and emissions taxes and so forth, things which will depress usage of greenhouse emitting things... and incidentally, by reducing usage, buy us a little more time to sort out the economic question.
Uh, no. Any reasonable science will tell you that continued, and possibly increased fossil fuel reliance, is going to significantly harm our environment. Those countries that can, primarily affulent, nuclear nations (USA, UK, France, etc) should build reactors because they're not all that dangerous. France already gets 80% of it's electricity from nuclear power, so why can't we do the same?
If you're worried about the incredibly unlikely Chernobyl scenario, why can't you worry about the highly unpredictable effects of increased atmospheric carbon emmissions? Sure, they might not hurt anything, but when you can chart world temperature changes from a mere volcanic eruption, you've got to consider millions of barrels of gasoline, not to mention unfathomable of HFO burned by ships daily, as a very real source of a potential problem. Not to mention, the effects of any said global warming-type fallout could have worldwide consequences including climate shifts that could cause famine, drought, widespread death/extinction, flooding, extreme weather, disease, a nearly complete breakdown of the global economy, etc.
It's very obvious that CO2 helps regulate the way in which incoming solar radiation effects our planet. That's grade school science. The question is, how much more can we add to it before we disturb the balance?
Because we could quite simply build plants like WIPP and the respective reactors in remote regions, any unlikely fallout from said failure of reactor could be isolated, and therefore the risk makes sense. Not to mention, besides Chernobyl, there really haven't been any cases to warrant fear of nuclear reactors.
I'd guess you haven't seen a fossil fuel burning plant. You wouldn't believe how dirty a place near a "clean-burning" coal plant is. The same can be said in places where other fuels are burned.
As for storage/security of by-products, bear in mind that a mere chip of fuel-grade urainium is equivalent to 110 gallons of gasoline in potential energy storage. To put it another way, you could drive your Toyota Prius more than 6,000 miles on that one chip of urainium. So, the amount of waste that needs storage is relative - you get a whole lot out of the amount that it would take to fill a contaminants container. Furthermore, science IS science, and I believe one of the goals of WIPP is to find a solution to eventually neutralize radioactive materials, and they currently get them to a relatively safe level anyway - some of this every-so-toxic stuff you seem afraid of is trucked down the road I use to go to school. It truely is not that dangerous. Why you think it is, is beyond me when the consequences for carbon emmissions are an ever-present reality, too.
You don't need to lecture me about the dangers of global warming. I'm in Australia, we're already living it, in the form of a probably permenant drought. We've already done damage, it's too late to stop and we're going to live with the consequences in decades to come... alls I'm saying is that we've got a little longer than is often portratyed and the panicky adoption of a difficult and hazardous technology isn't called for yet. Especially when you consider that at first, what we need to be doing is stabilising emissions at present levels then reducing them. We don't need to eliminate it. What we need, to reduce carbon emissions, is things like carbon trading and pollution taxes and stuff. THAT'S what's going to reduce emissions. Cost-effective economic reforms.
You're right, we need to move the hell away from coal, but when you consider the cost and danger and waste drawbacks of present nuclear technology, it doesn't look a whole lot better, just trading one set of problems for another. As I say, it's hideously expensive and thus outcompetes other alternatives. Over the last 40 years there have been billions (if not a couple of trillion) of dollars spent subsidising power plants. The UK spends over a billion pounds a year on subsidising nuclear power, the US no doubt spends many times that. Research and development on nuclear power CONTINUES to get higher subsidisation than renewable energy in many countries, notably France and Japan.
Nuclear is dangerous. We've only had 40 years of it and there have been numerous accidents and contaminations and deaths even in developed countries. Like I say, the fact that an accident is unlikely doesn't mean it's not there, and as more and more plants are built by more and more countries, and as time goes on, the chance for catastrophe increases. You'll forgive me if I don't have the greatest of trust in humankind's infallibility.
I'm coming at this from a different angle because I'm in a country that does not have nuclear power. We're looking at it in terms of an either/or type scenario--spend billions of dollars to establish and maintain a hazardous, waste-producing, potentially disastrous energy industry, or instituting carbon trading and pollution taxes, halting land clearing, promoting renewables which have been shown to be able to SAFELY be able to provide a decent chunk of present energy requirements (as I said, 50% in the UK even with present technology). Tidal, solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and taking a hit to our overinflated standard of living in the name of sustainability. Frankly the choice seems clear for countries without nuclear power.
I should just be clear I'm not necessarily against nuclear power period, just I think the level of expansion needed to supplant fossil fuels is way too high. It's not the best option. Especially for countries that don't have nuclear at present.
I'm sorta biased too - the electricity powering my computer comes primarily from a nuclear plant in Arizona.
What I'm suggesting is that of the 30 countries that have reactors, these countries should increase their use of the technology because they have invested and subsidized them to such a great extent. ALL petroleum industries are subsidized in the United States, too, which is the primary reason we have $2.15/gal gasoline, despite what OPEC would have you believe. Seeing as we already spend money on it, and it isn't hideously expensive in terms of fuel (urainium ore goes for about $80/kg, not unlike what a 55 gallon barrel of oil was selling for earlier this year, but it has much, much higher potential energy). Some of the reactors just run on the ore, they don't enrich it at all, and some reactors are being made to run on weapon-grade urainium, getting rid of our insane stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
When you consider the numbers, out of 500ish reactors that have been made for use, only one has failed. Chernobyl, which was a product of the crumbling Soviet Union, and wasn't built to the orrect standards in the first place. This is why I'm not saying that we should give every country a bag of urainium and millions to make a reactor. Just the countries with the pre existing know-how and safe operating record should.
Other countries should invest in renewables, and impliment those, just as the countries using nuclear should. But I'd much rather see new nuclear plants built than fossil fuel burning ones, primarily because nuclear doesn't particularly add to any real problem, unlike fossil fuel plants which explicitly do.
Obviously, as there are 450 operational reactors which produce electricty for the public, it would hardly be "jumping" to a new thing at all. I mean, 20% of the worlds energy is produced in nuclear power plants already. And we have literally thousands of pounds of fuel that we need to get rid of that you really can only do a few things with - namely, produce electrity.
I think you're blowing it out of proportion. There has only been ONE catostrophic failure of nuclear power in the 52 years we've had electricity producing plants. For something that we've only been able to harness for 60 years, and considering that many of the initial deaths we caused by exposure to what people didn't even know was poisonous at first and/or poorly handled Soviet programmes, it really isn't that bad.
Many people have lost their lives in accidents involving hydrocarbon production, too, and a plant failure can cause essentially toxic emmissions aswell. There have been far more instances of hydrocarbon accidents resulting in death, fires, and toxic output from said fires.
As for the by-products, we can actually do something about the waste from nuclear, but we can't do anything about the gases of hydrocarbons once their emmitted. The research that happens in New Mexico at the WIPP site goes to trying to make the waste "safe" and they de-toxify it to such a level it can be transported on public roads. Nuclear is hardly a problem for the 30 countries that currently use it. I would agree, though, that nuclear technology shouldn't be proliferated around the world as a solution, but should be used by the countries that already have it as a much better temporary solution.
One last note - carbon taxes would never work here. The US completely ignored the Kyoto treaty, and as the worlds largest consumer of hydrocarbons, we simply won't do anything of the sort.
You just wait til Al Gore becomes president. THEN WE'LL SEE WHAT'S WHAT.