bpohl

As well as in planning meetings... I need a new career...

bpohl

www.cnu.org

bpohl

Why do you come to a forum to spew this crap when the description for the forum is as follows:

Did you give up your car for good? Is your bike and public transportation the only way you travel from point A to point B? If your only mode of transportation is your bike, discuss your car-free lifestyle here.

Where is YOUR discussion of YOUR carfree lifestyle? To me, car-lite is an understandable deviation. Car-obsessed is not.

Platy

Or maybe you just need a new city!

bpohl

That'll probably be much more the case.

syn0n

Considering that nuclear plants really don't cost more than coal plants (they're just slightly more expensive), monetary issues aren't what prevent them from being built. So there's no real reason we couldn't build 700 of them if we really wanted to. I wouldn't worry about reactors heating up our planet, because they just boil water which turns into steam and drives a turbine. Steam doesn't trap solar radiation in the atmosphere like carbon dioxide and methane do, so they should have a minescule impact in that regard. It's a complex problem that requires a complex solution. But don't be fooled; just as there are hundreds of coal plants in the works, China alone wants to build 100 nuclear reactors, Russia wants 58, there are 30 in the works in the United States, and Japan is looking to build 12.

I think many people forget, too, that there are 104 nuclear reactors in the US, which is slighly less than 25% of the reactors world wide (438). It's a proven technology that likely is the best step forward we have.

Roody

Thanks for the info.

Can I ask a couple followup questions? I know steam doesn't trap solar radiation, but the reactors themselves produce so much heat. That heat is dissipated with cooling water, I believe. How many reactors could be running without contributing significantly to global warming? What about warming on a local level? You said how many reactors they want to build. How many reactors would it take to supply half the electricity demand for 2027? Is it even feasible to think of nuclear supplying half the world's power? How likely is it that people in the US and other countries will support nuclear, given the fears, which you say are irrational, but which are nonetheless very real? Of the 438 reactors in the world, how many are civilian and how many are military? Do they still use the same basic designs as Chernobyl and TMI?

bragi

I agree that nuclear is possibly the best choice (among a bunch of not-so-great choices), but I wonder: if everyone starts converting to nuclear electricity production, is there enough fuel to go around? (Breeder reactors are a possiblility, I guess, but they're pretty dirty in terms of waste.... )

bragi

BTW: water vapor is an incredibly effective greenhouse gas. It traps heat way better than CO2. Fortunately, it tends not to stay in the atmosphere very long. Unless it gets really hot and remains that way.

Roody

Of course. That's why it doesn't cool off on humid nights.

I had read this and then forgot about it. So it might be one of those feedback problems. The hotter it gets, the more water vapor there will be, and the the more water vapor the hotter it will get. And so on.....

Cosmoline

It can if you get rid of your car overnight. Like I said earlier, the question of solutions is probably best in a different thread. I think the best approach is to simply do it. I cannot control what others do, I can only do what I can do. If enough of us start riding bikes all around and show that it *can* be done, it breaks the conventional wisdom that it cannot be done.

syn0n

Some of these questions have no good answer that I'm aware of. Just as with anything that creates heat, I'm sure there'd be heat around the reactors on a similar scale to plants that burn things. But even hundreds of individually hot blips on the earth's surface wouldn't make anything near a noticable difference in global temps. Solar radiation accounts for almost all of the incoming energy, and greenhouse gasses trap this energy in our atmosphere. That's what heats things up. And water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but vapor emissions only tend to stay resident on a scale of days at the longest, while gasses like CO2 stay around for decades. Reactor steam emissions wouldn't build up like CO2 has, and we wouldn't suffer the same global warming consequences from it.

As for the number of reactors needed to supply half of the world's energy needs in the future... that's a truly unpredictable one. If reactors become more efficient, you wouldn't need as many. If population increase creates more demand, you'd need more. I'm not sure if there is a good answer to this question, but it's perfectly feasable in every aspect save dealing with the waste. If we can make recycling practical, then reactors should be much less of a problem than trying to store the waste.

As I understand it, the DOE is working on getting approval for a nuclear waste recycling plant right now. I'm not sure if military/research reactors are included in that number or not. Reactors that generate electricity for civilian use can certainly be civilian owned and I think in the United States most, if not all, are. As for reactor types, there are dozens of different designs. There are many reactors built in the 1970's still in use around the world, and there are also many new designs in use as well. I don't know if any Chernobyl type reactors are still in use anywhere, but it wasn't exactly a defect that caused the meltdown there anyway. It was a safety test that went horribly wrong.

syn0n

I think that given the right technology, this wouldn't be a problem either. We've got a lot of weapons grade uranium and plutonium that can be converted into fuel for reactors and it is possible to recycle the fuel and reuse it again. As I recall from high school chemestry, an pencil eraser-sized peice of fuel grade uranium contains as much energy as 2,000lbs of coal or 150 gallons of crude oil. 2,000lbs of uranium contains an incredibly large amount of energy when compared to a similar amount of coal.