NationStates Jolt Archive

According to green guru professor James Lovelock. He's caused quite a few stirs with his views.

Lovelock has become concerned about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that "Only nuclear power can now halt global warming". In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfil the large scale energy needs of mankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions.

In 2005, against the backdrop of renewed UK government interest in nuclear power, Lovelock again publicly announced his support for nuclear energy, stating, "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy". [1]

Although Lovelock's interventions in the public debate on nuclear power are recent, his views on it are longstanding. In his 1988 book The Ages Of Gaia he states: "I have never regarded nuclear radiation or nuclear power as anything other than a normal and inevitable part of the environment. Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesised the elements that go to make our planet and ourselves."



He makes sense, but the threat of meltdown and radiation poisoning seem to worry mos tpeople. Is nuclear the way forward?

Is nuclear the way forward?
Yep. We bang on about global warming, while passing over this clean, green technology.

Madness.

It delays the problem, and makes a rather more interesting one. What do you do with all that waste? Dig a really deep hole and drop it in?

Hydroelectric, wind, solar...


No, fission isnt the only way to go.

Well if fast reactors were used, then the waste would be smaller, plus we coul pay the poorer nations to safely dispose of it. Or if it's effective, send it into space.

It delays the problem, and makes a rather more interesting one. What do you do with all that waste? Dig a really deep hole and drop it in?
That used to be my complaint about nuclear but in reality the amount of waste is not very much. In theory by the time the amount of waste becomes a problem we will have developed a better alternative.

Unfortunately with the exception of hydroelectric, wind and solar power are not cost effective yet.

It is not the only alternative.

For one thing, you cannot perform system frequency regulation very well without a large quantity of pumped storage capacity on standby. So you are going to have hydro whether you like it or not, unless you plan on dotting gas turbines all over the place, with the pipeline network to back them up.

Wind is also a potentially very significant contributor to zero-emissions electricity generation.

In a highly populated technologically advanced industrialised country, nuclear is nice to have. But it is not the only thing, and there is no such thing as one single solution, because the technical issues you are trying to solve are far more complex.

You can also take garbage and turn it into crude oil. Then take the crude oil and refine it. I don't know what the process is called though.

Yes we should use nuclear power, along with renewable stuff.

You can also take garbage and turn it into crude oil. Then take the crude oil and refine it. I don't know what the process is called though.
Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future Part 2. :D

Nuclear is a good answer, but a reasonable country won't ignore every option. Wind, Water, Geothermal, Solar all have their spots as well, and a country shouldn't rely on just one to replace its addiction to oil.

Whatever works, in short.

Hydroelectric, wind, solar...


No, fission isnt the only way to go.

Hydroelectric means dams

Wind and solar mean on again off again power or strip mining for the raw materials for huge battery banks.


I advocate a minimal number of nuclear plants for desalination of seawater in conjunction with deep drilling for forced geothermal power wherever we want it on the planet.

Ok, here is what I was talking about.

http://www.matr.net/article-6837.html

http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2003/Anything-Into-Oil1may03.htm

Nuclear is a good answer, but a reasonable country won't ignore every option. Wind, Water, Geothermal, Solar all have their spots as well, and a country shouldn't rely on just one to replace its addiction to oil.

Whatever works, in short.
You right, we can't just replace our addiction to oil with renewable overnight. We're increasing the amount of renewable we use every year but it will be a long time until it's providing all the power we use. Using nuclear until then is good.

You right, we can't just replace our addiction to oil with renewable overnight. We're increasing the amount of renewable we use every year but it will be a long time until it's providing all the power we use. Using nuclear until then is good.

Damn, you're good. :D

Thermal!

With reactor-breeding technology, we'd have enough uranium to last hundreds of years (I believe this is if nuclear energy became the most common energy), so I believe we should use more Nuclear power.

Solar is not really viable – is doesn’t have much in the way of energy density, plus solar cells degrade in efficiency rather rapidly.

Hydroelectric only works if you have a suitable site to build, which is not all that common, and you don’t care about the severe ecological damage it brings.

Geothermal is a great source of energy, just not available is most areas.

Biomass has way too many problems associated with it, from environmental impact to low return on investment.

Tidal generators are an appalling suggestion – not only do they not produce much power, they completely destroy the local ecology.

Wind is a decent source of power, just highly inconsistent and problematic in some areas. You would need a huge capacitor to store some of the power and to help balance the load – having brown-outs with spikes of power is not exactly a good electrical grid. Not to mention not all locations are suitable for windmills – rather hazardous to birds, large scale wind farms disrupt local wind patterns enough to damage local ecologies, ice forms on the blades (which can either break free and be flying knives, or they can cause the blade itself to break). Take a look at some wind farms and you will inevitably find a large pile of broken blades.

Nonetheless – wind is probably the best choice for rural areas (say a mine out in Utah) with high wind. A windmill and a battery array makes more sense out there – distribution of power is not exactly lossless, and you can pick up a high-load windmill for about $180k, which will provide enough for a few operations and pay for itself in a couple years.

When you talk about a whole solution, none of these provides nearly enough to power a city. That’s what you have to look at – what is going to work for a city, not just what farmer john can do.

Nuclear is the most viable option. Some modern reactor designs have no risk of meltdown and have a very high power output.

It produces some radioactive waste, but that can be processed and recycled (of course everyone puts limitations keeping any of these facilities from being built, all in the name of being green of course – better a huge pile of radioactive waste in somebody else’s back yard than some temporarily pass through mine). A lot of waste has a very short half-life. Sticking it in a secure storage facility for 40 years is not unbearable. Some of it can be processed to extract valuable minerals – gold, platinum, etc. Some can be processed into an inert glass – so no risk of ‘spillage’ at all. With fusion reactors coming online, one of the methods for disposal is to run high level radioactive waste from the current reactors through the fusion reactor – which not only fuels it, but reduces the high level waste into something easily manageable while producing significant power generation.

So what arguments are there against nuclear?
Accidents are not a concern - pebble-bed reactors shut down (not blow up) if there is a problem.
Waste is not a concern – it can be processed and reduced to a very small amount with a relatively short half-life.
It is clean, reliable, consistent power.
Sure it is far more expensive to build a new reactor than to just keep using a coal-burning plant, but the environmental costs more than compensate for the higher initial investment.

Actually, as it's currently known, nuclear power has some severe drawbacks.

First, let's split our discussion into two sections. The first section covers the existing reactors, which are primarily pressurized light-water cooled. The first and most obvious problem that existing technology has is vulnerability to terrorist attack. Now of course there is the threat of simply flying a plane into a reactor, but I think this risk is a tad overblown--not to mention that if I were a terrorist, I wouldn't really strike the same way repeatedly, as the public just gets numb. Rather, there are many more subtle ways of causing severe accidents that don't require hijacking a plane: any time you have radioactive water under high pressure, all you have to do is burst a pipe and vent it out into the air to create a catastrophe for the surrounding area. Secondly, there is also the terrorist-related problems associated with transportation of waste. After all, the waste has to go somewhere, and what easier way to render a downtown uninhabitable than by hijacking a waste truck and blowing it up (there is also the possibility that the truck will simply spill on its own if it gets in a traffic accident). Third, even leaving off terrorist-related threats, there is also the simple problem of what to do with the waste: as is, nuclear power generates about 20% of America's electricity, and the backlogged waste from those sites is already beyond the capacity of the Yucca Mountain project--the DOE has actually had to repeatedly raise the ceiling on the amount allowed (which is one of the reasons why the Yucca Mountain project is now stalled on the grounds of DOE simply manufacturing data to support their project). Dramatically increasing the amount of nuclear power also increases the amount of waste, and we can't deal with the waste we have.

Now, the second possibility is experimental breeder reactors. These have had some success, especially EBR-II out at the Idaho National Labs, but they have not been commercially deployed and are in many ways still in the prototypical phases. EBR-II was shut down in 1994, after all, long before Argonne had perfected what was supposed to be the best part of the breeder program: the pyroprocessing that refurbishes spent fuel and converts it into usable fuel again. Furthermore, even if we wave away the logistical difficulties, there are also other problems, some of which are fairly easily solvable, others not so much. For one thing, the IFR (the type of reactor EBR-II was) has a design flaw known as a positive void coefficient above a certain power rating (500 megawatts, as I recall). The positive void coefficient was the same design flaw that lifted the pile cap on Chernobyl. Now, it's possible to make multiple smaller reactors and tie them into the same turbine, but still, that may raise production costs. Additionally, you have to recall that the IFR and most other breeder reactors are light-metal cooled. The IFR, for instance, is lithium-cooled, and even a basic chemistry student can tell you that lithium + exposure to air = big boom. So even more crucially than the light-water reactors, they would be vulnerable to penetration of the reactor safeguard wall.

As for what I would recommend, I actually do recommend more research into nuclear power and possible use. I do not, however, think that it is our panacea, nor do I think it can substitute for other renewables like solar and wind. Solar especially, since there is a crapload of unused desert land in Nevada that could be turned into a proverbial gold mine of cheap solar power if we were only willing to use existing technology to route the power into our grid and take on the coal and gas industry.

People always talk about the negative effects and possibilities of nuclear power... But other than chernobyl, not exactly manned well, or the most advanced nuclear reactor, there havn't really been any major problems with nuclear power. A few close calls, but really...

Its only getting safer too.

Clearly we must take all of the waste, and launch it at the sun. Duh.

No i don't think we should use nuclear energy for all of our needs when the cap on chernobyl blew, only 5% of the material was released if the molten uranium had reached a pool of water underneth the reactor left over from a firefighting attempt, half of europe would be uninhabitable, completely irradiated. All the area within 9 miles of chernobyl has a radiation level of 1 runcheon per hour about 16 times the normal level and that is AFTER the coffin was placed over the reactor. I am much more frightened by the threat of a nuclear disaster than global warming.

Clearly we must take all of the waste, and launch it at the sun. Duh.
If only there was a way to power the rocket with the waste