Originally Posted by
frymaster
a couple of points:
1. a million bucks? how many tax payers are there in the united states? 200 million? that's one half of one penny per year per taxpayer. sheesh.
2. bicycles are 'nineteenth century technology'? maybe if mchenry is driving a model t that argument holds water, but the last time i checked bicycles with equal-sized wheels and parallelogram derailleurs didn't make the scene until the late forties.
3. nuclear power? to halt climate change? has no one ever factored in the amount of energy used to mine and, more importantly refine, the uranium used in these reactors? when the darlington plant came online in ontario the government was talking about a seven to ten year payback on co2 savings if high-grade ore was used. that means that it would take at least seven years of full operation before any savings in co2 was realized. now, based on a forty year lifespan, that still means a win, but it ain't a magic bullet. oh, and enrichment requires the use of cfc-114... a pretty heavy duty ozone-destroyer.
Darlington is a CANDU (CANada Deuterium Uranium) reactor, and the thing about CANDU reactors is that no enrichment process is needed. CANDU reactors can use a U-235 ore of 0.7% (natural ore) while LWR (Light Water Reactors) and PWR (Pressurized Water Reactors) require a much higher rate of enrichment (between 2.5-20%). The whole design of a CANDU reactor is based off the use of natural uranium, this is the reason it uses heavy water (deuterium). There are a few other things that make CANDU reactors nice compared to LWR and PWR, such as it ability to use MOX (Mixed OXide fuels), RU (Recovered Uranium), and DUPIC (Direct Use of PWR fuel In CANDU). MOX is a mixture of uranium and plutonium. The plutonium can be obtained from nuclear weapons that are being dismantled and therefore always for "recycling". RU is actually is spent uranium from a LWR. The use of both MOX and RU allow for less nuclear waste. However, the CANDU reactor only deals with waste issues that were anthropogenic in its nature, and of course has waste itself.
There are other problems inherent in CANDU reactors, because of the use of Deuterium, but I am not going to even bother getting into that.