Bill Gates To Commit Billions For Clean Energy

amddragonpc said:
Wind and solar can't meet the demands of the current populace if we switched over to it. Thus, the price to the consumer will be higher for these forms of energy. Perfect! Automatic increase in tax revenue for the government without doing a damn thing. :rolleyes:
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And right this second, neither can Nuclear. Sure we could build reactors, but that'd take at least a decade, but good luck getting people support it, because nobody wants nuclear reactors in their neighborhood, so figure 15 to 20 years....maybe.

I'm not exactly sure when TX started doing a lot of wind energy, but 10% is now from wind and more is coming on line.
 
jpm100 said:
Nothing wrong with coal that isn't a politically motivated government power & money grab.
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Well, other than all the crap that's blown up the stack, even with filtration. Including radioactive byproducts.

But hey, nuclear's bad! But with coal, if we just put the stuff in the wind, it's automatically someone else's problem!
 
nilepez said:
And right this second, neither can Nuclear. Sure we could build reactors, but that'd take at least a decade, but good luck getting people support it, because nobody wants nuclear reactors in their neighborhood, so figure 15 to 20 years....maybe.

I'm not exactly sure when TX started doing a lot of wind energy, but 10% is now from wind and more is coming on line.
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Uhm. NOBODY is saying a switchover is going to be instantaneous.

You're arguing that, because said switchover isn't instant, nuclear power can't handle baseline power.

Patently false.

Done PROPERLY, nuclear most definitely CAN.

Will it take TIME to implement? Of course!
 
Additionally, sure, TX may be getting 10% of it's power from wind now. On a good day...

But, due to land use and site suitability, there's going to be an upper limit to how much wind power can actually be implemented.

And if you think it's going to be anything CLOSE to 100%, you're crazy.

Also, in a lot of these cases, what's being implemented isn't just wind. It's wind PLUS natural gas. So when the wind isn't blowing, or isn't blowing in a way that's useful for the turbine (too fast or too slow), you're burning natural gas. CNG still has a carbon output. GREATLY reduced from things like coal and oil burning. But still a non-zero sum.
 
It doesn't make sense to me when Nuclear waste (which can be easily contained) is listed as a reason against Nuclear, while no one cares when coal power plants release massive amounts of pollution into the air. Perhaps nuclear can adopt a similar waste disposal technique by grinding down nuclear waste into dust and sprinkling it into the atmosphere across the country. Then at least there would be no more significantly large chunks of waste to use as a scapegoat or as a source of ignorance-based fear :rolleyes:
 
scojer said:
Why don't we figure out how to tap into the sky?
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Ben Franklin did so by 'bleeding' the power down without causing lightning.

However, the potential between Earth and the Ionosphere's top is in the range of hundreds of thousands of Volts. 300 000 at the most. Such massive voltage is very difficult to handle in any way due to - I believe - the strength of many dielectrics and the reactance of step-down and storage circuitry. It causes the available current to drop as the receiver becomes energized.

Lightning is even more difficult - many of its' power is wasted as light, it's Voltage is in the millions range with several thousand amperes -all within a split second timeframe.
And oddly enough the trials so far showed that it wouldn't even be enough to provide a viable alternative to, well, anything. I've read someplace that all the thunderbolts in the world wouldn't be able to power 100% of households only in the US.

Also, wasn't it Bill Gates or Google who was supporting the development of reactors operating on spent low-key fuel?
 
Chas said:
Uhm. NOBODY is saying a switchover is going to be instantaneous.

You're arguing that, because said switchover isn't instant, nuclear power can't handle baseline power.

Patently false.

Done PROPERLY, nuclear most definitely CAN.

Will it take TIME to implement? Of course!
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No I'm saying you don't know where other technology will be in 10 years (or more, since realistically it'd take 20 years to get 1 nuclear reactor online).


Chas said:
Additionally, sure, TX may be getting 10% of it's power from wind now. On a good day...

But, due to land use and site suitability, there's going to be an upper limit to how much wind power can actually be implemented.

And if you think it's going to be anything CLOSE to 100%, you're crazy.

Also, in a lot of these cases, what's being implemented isn't just wind. It's wind PLUS natural gas. So when the wind isn't blowing, or isn't blowing in a way that's useful for the turbine (too fast or too slow), you're burning natural gas. CNG still has a carbon output. GREATLY reduced from things like coal and oil burning. But still a non-zero sum.
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I'm not claiming that 10% of the people get there energy exclusively from wind. I'm claiming that 10% of energy is generated by wind. The issue with too much energy will eventually be resolved either by shifting usage from day to night or by storing excess energy at night for use during the day.

For solar, there's the research into solar roads. It may not work (I ahve to believe durability is an issue), but that too will help.

Nukes are at best a stop gap. The masses do not want them. Now if you can build Plants in Russia to supply power here, then we'd probably accept, but nobody wants one in their city.
 
GotNoRice said:
It doesn't make sense to me when Nuclear waste (which can be easily contained) is listed as a reason against Nuclear, while no one cares when coal power plants release massive amounts of pollution into the air. Perhaps nuclear can adopt a similar waste disposal technique by grinding down nuclear waste into dust and sprinkling it into the atmosphere across the country. Then at least there would be no more significantly large chunks of waste to use as a scapegoat or as a source of ignorance-based fear :rolleyes:
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Actually, I think most do care about this, which is why coal plants are a dying bread (as is the entire coal industry). That said, what's killing them is Natural Gas.
 
Bladestorm said:
Burning coal to generate electricity releases far less mercury than natural sources such as volcanoes and wildfires.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/11/24/the-truth-about-coal-and-mercury/
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Shhhh...that's pertinent info that groups like the EPA, Greenpeance, Sierra Club, and establishment parties don't want to get leaked out and cause mass education via factual info. ...just like the truth about efficient, ultra-clean, and safe nuclear power generation. ;)
 
For those of you arguing that solar isn't viable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

Molten salt is used to store the sun's energy as thermal energy. The thermal energy is used to boil water to drive steam turbines. Thermal energy storage techniques can store energy for days or even weeks. These plants work through the night, and can compensate for bouts of overcast.

That's about all I know. Not claiming to be an expert here, but I sure do get frustrated when I see people summarily writing off solar and wind technologies. From what I understand, wind is meant to be an augmentative power source, not a direct replacement. Wind turbines don't "steal" energy. The wind doesn't hit the blade and disappear. It's kind of amazing to see such a fundamental misunderstanding of what wind is, really.

What I'm curious about is what effect a large scale adoption of individual or neighborhood-scale residential power augmentation systems like geothermal, solar panels, wind, and hydroelectric would have. Would a huge increase in micro power plants tailored to their micro-climates help, or is it really more beneficial to produce power on a regional scale and then export the electricity?
 
nilepez said:
Actually, I think most do care about this, which is why coal plants are a dying bread (as is the entire coal industry). That said, what's killing them is Natural Gas.
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Unfortunately for every coal plant we shut down, China builds 5 new ones... and the jet stream blows east :(
 
GotNoRice said:
Unfortunately for every coal plant we shut down, China builds 5 new ones... and the jet stream blows east :(
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I believe China is trying to move away from that, but during their rapid growth phase (which seems to be over), they went with the fastest/cheapest fuel available and now they're paying the price with a million or so deaths/year.
 
aShrubbery! said:
Nuclear energy can be reliable, and it can be safe. I agree it's a better alternative than coal, but still NOBODY wants nuclear waste in their state. NOBODY!
And that is the big downside of nuclear energy, the nuclear waste. And it's BIG!

But hey, if you volunteer to store it in your basement, I'm ok with that!
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I live in Nevada, I didn't care when they were going to use Yucca mountain, was disappointed when it got shut down. So now that I just destroyed your "nobody wants nuclear waste in their state" statement, care to throw anymore meaningless and baseless statements out?
 
Grahamkracka said:
Lots of nuclear engineers and physicists on hardocp...who knew? :rolleyes:
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Do you have a specific complaint about something someone has said? Do you feel that you are in a position to judge who is qualified to partake in the discussion? Do you hold other discussions up to the same standards regarding who is allowed to have an opinion? Have you contributed anything to this thread that wouldn't more appropriately be deposited into a toilet? What is your stance on the issues discussed in this thread?
 
Given the security aspects of storing nuclear waste (protecting it from being captured for use in dirty bombs) and the long term costs of storage and security I am curious that with the reduction of costs for rocketry, why we don't just shoot nuclear waste into space with a trajectory for the sun ... dropping nuclear material into the sun wouldn't hurt the sun and it gets it out of the way permanently ... I know it would be expensive but those storage facilities have to be pricey too
 
kbrickley said:
Given the security aspects of storing nuclear waste (protecting it from being captured for use in dirty bombs) and the long term costs of storage and security I am curious that with the reduction of costs for rocketry, why we don't just shoot nuclear waste into space with a trajectory for the sun ... dropping nuclear material into the sun wouldn't hurt the sun and it gets it out of the way permanently ... I know it would be expensive but those storage facilities have to be pricey too
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Issue is that if/when the rocket fails, now you have nuclear waste burning up in the atmosphere and distributing it over large areas. There have already been minor incidents related to this, usually when something using an RTG ends up burning up. Nuclear waste however would have much more potential for a massive incident, as there would be much more nuclear material that could burn up. Finally, if launching rockets was really that cheap compared to the amount of weight we would need to send up, we would already have massive rotating space stations in orbit, mars would already have people on it, etc.

In terms of security concerns, the real concern is when nuclear waste is forced to be stored on-site at each nuclear plant as opposed to a central location. There is a lot more potential for a security mishap in that situation.
 
kbrickley said:
Given the security aspects of storing nuclear waste (protecting it from being captured for use in dirty bombs) and the long term costs of storage and security I am curious that with the reduction of costs for rocketry, why we don't just shoot nuclear waste into space with a trajectory for the sun ... dropping nuclear material into the sun wouldn't hurt the sun and it gets it out of the way permanently ... I know it would be expensive but those storage facilities have to be pricey too
Click to expand...
Cost to sending things into orbit is still very high, on the order of thousands of dollars per KG for LEO and several tens of thousands of dollars to get to geosynchronous orbit.

The cost of nuclear waste storage is already factored into the cost of electricity and a large fund has already been setup for an eventual site. Plus the nature of high level waste means that it basically protects itself from being stolen since the radiation will likely kill a terrorist/criminal trying to steal it.
 
How about going back to the Moon and taking our reactors there?
With this awakening of private owned space companies, robotics, computing, aren't those companies capable of setting up a traffic of repeatedly slingshooting Moon-Earth cargo carriers and handing them off to smaller 'tanker' units in the stratosphere? As they would fall, something like turbines combined with a portion of the transported cargo of power stored in <to be continued> would provide a power reservoir to whirl up again after dropping the cargo container safely?
Another conroversial method is building relays setup around the Moon and Earth to properly target a laser beam or microwaves to receivers back to Earth.

Kind of a secondary oddity - anyone remember Project Orion? an actually viable spacecraft providing power by detonating nukes behind it? It was generally deemed too unsafe because all that radiation and fallout would eventually fall to Earth poisoning people. But how about shuttling the parts away to somewhere like Venus on a stationary orbit with the planet between the craft and Earth. That way, we would be able to safely rocket-jump ourselves away while using a cool, distant planet as the garbage bin and a gravity vacuum preventing the contamination of Earth.
 
GotNoRice said:
Issue is that if/when the rocket fails, now you have nuclear waste burning up in the atmosphere and distributing it over large areas. There have already been minor incidents related to this, usually when something using an RTG ends up burning up. Nuclear waste however would have much more potential for a massive incident, as there would be much more nuclear material that could burn up. Finally, if launching rockets was really that cheap compared to the amount of weight we would need to send up, we would already have massive rotating space stations in orbit, mars would already have people on it, etc.

In terms of security concerns, the real concern is when nuclear waste is forced to be stored on-site at each nuclear plant as opposed to a central location. There is a lot more potential for a security mishap in that situation.
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There is a concept where you can setup launch that would not be rocket-based but instead like a rubber-band that gets launched into space (just enough pressure that you overcome the force of gravity). Then, once in space, it would be towed on a trajectory towards the sun before you unhinge the tow. Newton's law of motion would take over for the remainder of the journey to the sun.

Every person that I have seen refute sending nuclear waste to space use rocket as a reason against it. Fortunately, if you use no rockets or fuel of any kind then that rocket argument no longer applies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/437/1

Scientifically, it is 100% doable. It has been done on small scale already. It has to be built on a bigger scale. Maybe enough to carry 200 pound container per launch? Then you can launch nuclear waste once every couple days towards the sun.
 
jpm100 said:
Nothing wrong with coal that isn't a politically motivated government power & money grab.
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Wow, just wow. The ignorance in that sentence just knocked me out of my seat. Educate yourself about how nasty coal is. And no, Fox "News" is not an educational source.
 
nilepez said:
No I'm saying you don't know where other technology will be in 10 years (or more, since realistically it'd take 20 years to get 1 nuclear reactor online).
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Okay, I DO know how to track trends in tech though.

Unless a miracle happens, solar isn't going to mysteriously get 100% more efficient in the next 10 years (right now they're struggling for fractional percent improvements of their 14-15% efficiency rating). Yes, there are panels IN THE LAB that are higher efficiency, but those are in the lab, under ideal conditions, made from specialized materials, and cost an arm, a leg and a testicle or three to construct.

We already know the efficiency of solar thermal. Sure, they may eake out a improvements due to better manufacturing or a better thermal medium. But nothing that's going to revolutionize solar thermal.

We already know the general performance characteristics of wind turbines. It's a straight engineering exercise. Sure, we may be able to, once mass production happens, eake out efficiencies of scale. But materials science doesn't move that fast.

Nuclear power is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more energy-dense. Moreover, it's not dependent any sort of outside influence the way solar and wind are.

This is why it makes an ideal baseline power source.



I'm not claiming that 10% of the people get there energy exclusively from wind. I'm claiming that 10% of energy is generated by wind. The issue with too much energy will eventually be resolved either by shifting usage from day to night or by storing excess energy at night for use during the day.
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Which would require a complete revolution in battery storage technology. As it's not always feasible to build reservoirs at higher altitude and pump water uphill during peak generation times.

For solar, there's the research into solar roads. It may not work (I ahve to believe durability is an issue), but that too will help.
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It's an interesting concept. Unfortunately, when it hits the real world (and worse, jackass politicians and legislators...but I restate myself...), problems start to pop up when you REALLY examine it and start asking "dumb" questions. Like who owns said roads? Who owns the power said roads generate? Who pays (up front) to put them in? The power company or the various civil/municipal authorities tasked with maintaining roads?

Nukes are at best a stop gap. The masses do not want them. Now if you can build Plants in Russia to supply power here, then we'd probably accept, but nobody wants one in their city.
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No, FISSION, is, at best, a stopgap. But, using a Thorium fission system, we have a few millennia to figure it out.

As for "the masses" and "nobody". Most are people who've grown up scared by "China Syndrome", hiding under desks in the event of a nuclear war, and those that think that the world would just be better if there was no radiation in the environment at all and any use of the word "nuclear" immediately means "bomb".

In short, the gravely un/under-educated. Those who don't seem to understand that various nuclear incidents in history were caused by corner-cutting, idiocy and ridiculously prolonged use of ancient designs. That and they don't seem to understand that it's quite possible today to build reactors of various sizes that are inherently safe to anything other than maybe a ELE meteor strike, massive nuclear strike or maybe a Death Star (all of which would mean we'd have more problems on our hands than a single compromised reactor).

And things like Molten Salt reactors are tiny. A 500MW reactor can be assembled, shipped on two trucks, dropped on-site, hooked up, and be fired up in FAR less time that it takes to build a brand new solid fuel reactor. And for roughly 1/3 of the cost. The only thing you need to do to prep is pour the concrete sarcophagus and install any additional shielding/containment voids.

At the end of its service lifetime, you unbox the reactor modules, stuff them back on a pair of trucks and send them back to the factory to be rehabbed, while dropping a fresh unit into place.

Unless we go full-Idiocracy (which we may...God help us...), time and education on this will (hopefully) win out.
 
Solar-thermal - do you mean photovoltaic panels in general?

Will it be ever possible to produce panels that operate in the infrared (heat) spectrum? For the purpose of, say, lining interiors of heat generating devices? I hav read nano photovoltaics will enable this. Isn't this the major leap we'd like?
 
Blorgon said:
For those of you arguing that solar isn't viable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

Molten salt is used to store the sun's energy as thermal energy. The thermal energy is used to boil water to drive steam turbines. Thermal energy storage techniques can store energy for days or even weeks. These plants work through the night, and can compensate for bouts of overcast.

That's about all I know. Not claiming to be an expert here, but I sure do get frustrated when I see people summarily writing off solar and wind technologies. From what I understand, wind is meant to be an augmentative power source, not a direct replacement. Wind turbines don't "steal" energy. The wind doesn't hit the blade and disappear. It's kind of amazing to see such a fundamental misunderstanding of what wind is, really.

What I'm curious about is what effect a large scale adoption of individual or neighborhood-scale residential power augmentation systems like geothermal, solar panels, wind, and hydroelectric would have. Would a huge increase in micro power plants tailored to their micro-climates help, or is it really more beneficial to produce power on a regional scale and then export the electricity?
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The main problems with solar thermal aren't inconsistency.

The main problems are land usage and environmental/ecological damage from building them.

A lot of these are built out in "lifeless" deserts. Thing is, the deserts aren't exactly lifeless, and the construction of these facilities is destroying habitats for desert life. The same way dams destroy fish/wildlife habitats.

As for land usage. Ivanpah, the world's largest current solar thermal facility covers roughly 4000 acres (6.25 square miles) to produce 392 megawatts. And this was scaled back from it's original, planned capacity of 440MW.

As I said earlier. A molten salt reactor clocking in at 500MW is roughly the size of a pair of tractor trailers. Even if the containment/control facility was 1000x the size of reactor itself (858 square feet), it's still be a tiny fraction of the size of Ivanpah.

Again, this is what nuclear excels at. Energy density.
 
nilepez said:
I believe China is trying to move away from that, but during their rapid growth phase (which seems to be over), they went with the fastest/cheapest fuel available and now they're paying the price with a million or so deaths/year.
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China has ~5 billion people. The majority of which is flat, unskilled labor. And they have money rolling in like they were printing it.

"We're killing people with pollution." Don't care, we can breed more.
"We're polluting the planet." Are we making money? Don't care. We're making money. And most of our crap is blowing out into the sea or over into Japan. Fuck'em!

Are they researching alternate forms of power? Sure! But, in the mean time, there's all that cheap, dirty coal they can burn!
 
kbrickley said:
Given the security aspects of storing nuclear waste (protecting it from being captured for use in dirty bombs) and the long term costs of storage and security I am curious that with the reduction of costs for rocketry, why we don't just shoot nuclear waste into space with a trajectory for the sun ... dropping nuclear material into the sun wouldn't hurt the sun and it gets it out of the way permanently ... I know it would be expensive but those storage facilities have to be pricey too
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Rockets still blow up and go off course.

Do you want a couple tons of spent fuel coming down in your neighborhood at a couple thousand miles an hour?

Storage of current forms of spent fuel is basically the dumbest, but only option allowed due to punitive legislation and nuclear proliferation fears.

If reprocessing of fuel were allowed (which'd cause current nuclear fuel vendors to scream and bitch), tons of usable nuclear fuel could continue being used. And we'd eventually cook down most of it into stuff that's really REALLY "hot" (in a radiological sense), but extremely short-lived.

Storage of THAT sort of nuclear waste would be FAR more viable. And the amounts would be infinitesimally smaller, and the stabilization time would be measured in years or decades instead of millennia.
 
SLee said:
Cost to sending things into orbit is still very high, on the order of thousands of dollars per KG for LEO and several tens of thousands of dollars to get to geosynchronous orbit.

The cost of nuclear waste storage is already factored into the cost of electricity and a large fund has already been setup for an eventual site. Plus the nature of high level waste means that it basically protects itself from being stolen since the radiation will likely kill a terrorist/criminal trying to steal it.
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Actually, a lot of the current nuclear waste isn't that nasty. You can actually handle spent fuel pellets. It's almost as dangerous as eating a banana or going outside on a sunny day.

Unfortunately, this stuff will STAY radioactive for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. And what's worried about is PROLONGED exposure, as well as nuclear proliferation concerns, since with current uranium-based reactors, you could recook the fuel into bomb fuel.

One of the beauties of Thorium. It's base form really isn't bomb grade fissile material. Hell, to "light" a Thorium reactor, you need a small amount of Uranium to get the reaction going.

Now Thorium isotopes produced during fission *ARE* semi-decent fissile material. But they're so "hot", that simply handling it will kill you. And tracking such stolen material is easy. Moreover, most of these have half-lives measured in minutes and days. So the window for nefarious use is quite small.
 
michalrz said:
Solar-thermal - do you mean photovoltaic panels in general?

Will it be ever possible to produce panels that operate in the infrared (heat) spectrum? For the purpose of, say, lining interiors of heat generating devices? I hav read nano photovoltaics will enable this. Isn't this the major leap we'd like?
Click to expand...

No. Solar thermal is different from solar photovoltaics.

Photovoltaics are the "panels" you're thinking about.

A solar thermal facility is usually a large "field" of reflectors aimed at a central tower holding a thermal mass (sometimes oil, sometimes liquid salt, etc). The point is to heat the thermal mass, then use the captured heat to generate steam power the way current coal/oil/nuclear/geothermal "boiling water" facilities do. So the steam can turn a turbine.
 
Oh, so kind of a reverse gamma knife. Bad analogy I bet but I get the picture.

I'll bother some more though - are nano photovoltaic panels able to convert IR (heat) to usable voltages? Because that way we'd hit two birds with one stone. I think. And they're supposedly meant to last more than around 10 years. Is it true that 'current' (no pun) solar panels degrade after several years to a fraction of their original sensitivity?
 
As for "nanoPV", currently, I dunno honestly.

As for standard panels. Yes. Over their operational lifetime, they degrade.
It's also possible for portions of panels to just flat-out fail over time. But with better grades of panels, this doesn't kack the whole panel. Think "dead pixel count" on a monitor.
 
GotNoRice said:
It doesn't make sense to me when Nuclear waste (which can be easily contained) is listed as a reason against Nuclear, while no one cares when coal power plants release massive amounts of pollution into the air.
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It's just economics. Plenty of areas would be perfectly fine with a nuclear plant, it's just not cost effective compared to coal and oil. Even in China they're building far more coal than nuclear plants.

It's the same with renewable energy. Solar, wind, and hydro could be our primary energy sources if we really wanted to. You'd use excess energy from solar/wind to pump water into reservoirs and switch over to hydro when needed. We could even generate ammonia or hydrogen for vehicles using renewable power. Again, the problem is that coal and oil are far cheaper than building all that infrastructure.
 
Chas said:
The main problems with solar thermal aren't inconsistency.

The main problems are land usage and environmental/ecological damage from building them.

A lot of these are built out in "lifeless" deserts. Thing is, the deserts aren't exactly lifeless, and the construction of these facilities is destroying habitats for desert life. The same way dams destroy fish/wildlife habitats.

As for land usage. Ivanpah, the world's largest current solar thermal facility covers roughly 4000 acres (6.25 square miles) to produce 392 megawatts. And this was scaled back from it's original, planned capacity of 440MW.

As I said earlier. A molten salt reactor clocking in at 500MW is roughly the size of a pair of tractor trailers. Even if the containment/control facility was 1000x the size of reactor itself (858 square feet), it's still be a tiny fraction of the size of Ivanpah.

Again, this is what nuclear excels at. Energy density.
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Fair points. For what it's worth, I'm totally about nuclear. I was mostly addressing those in this thread that think "dirty" coal is a conspiracy, and that solar is inconsistent.

To be fair, Ivanpah does take up quite a lot of space, but that has a lot to do with the fact that there are three towers.

Something I'm curious about is the ecosystem argument. Yes, there are undoubtedly fragile desert habitats to consider. But—and bear with me, because again, I'm no expert—I feel like there's an argument to be made that desert habitats, while important, are nowhere near as important to human civilization as river habitats are. I'm not saying deserts are completely insignificant in relation to human civilization, but more, do we really rely on desert habitats enough for this to be a significant detractor?

Again, I'm totally into nuclear. But I'm also into solutions that are more palatable to the hoi polloi. Nuclear has a definite stigma, but to be fair, it has been earned.
 
How about we change our daily habits and not use so much power? :rolleyes:
 
Blorgon said:
Something I'm curious about is the ecosystem argument. Yes, there are undoubtedly fragile desert habitats to consider. But—and bear with me, because again, I'm no expert—I feel like there's an argument to be made that desert habitats, while important, are nowhere near as important to human civilization as river habitats are. I'm not saying deserts are completely insignificant in relation to human civilization, but more, do we really rely on desert habitats enough for this to be a significant detractor?

Again, I'm totally into nuclear. But I'm also into solutions that are more palatable to the hoi polloi. Nuclear has a definite stigma, but to be fair, it has been earned.
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Sorry, but you can't fix the environment by destroying parts of it.
And our PERSONAL reliance on it is not the point. Several centuries ago, nobody "relied" on the Amazon rainforest. NOW, we understand it's a massive CO2 sink, and various and sundry medical discoveries have increased the value of the area. Following your line of thinking, we should have clear-cut it around the beginning of the 20th century and been done with it.

As for nuclear having "earned" it's stigma, I'd argue that fairly strenuously.
 
Youn said:
How about we change our daily habits and not use so much power? :rolleyes:
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If you want to go back to shivering in a cave and sweltering in the summer, go ahead. Let us know how great it is.

Until then, this sort of thing is a limo liberal plaint.
 
What is limo liberal? I'm talking about being trying to be more conservative, not completely cutting everything off. Or do you mean any sort of personal change is somehow bad or frowned upon?
 
Chas said:
As for "the masses" and "nobody". Most are people who've grown up scared by "China Syndrome", hiding under desks in the event of a nuclear war, and those that think that the world would just be better if there was no radiation in the environment at all and any use of the word "nuclear" immediately means "bomb".

In short, the gravely un/under-educated. Those who don't seem to understand that various nuclear incidents in history were caused by corner-cutting, idiocy and ridiculously prolonged use of ancient designs. That and they don't seem to understand that it's quite possible today to build reactors of various sizes that are inherently safe to anything other than maybe a ELE meteor strike, massive nuclear strike or maybe a Death Star (all of which would mean we'd have more problems on our hands than a single compromised reactor).

And things like Molten Salt reactors are tiny. A 500MW reactor can be assembled, shipped on two trucks, dropped on-site, hooked up, and be fired up in FAR less time that it takes to build a brand new solid fuel reactor. And for roughly 1/3 of the cost. The only thing you need to do to prep is pour the concrete sarcophagus and install any additional shielding/containment voids.

At the end of its service lifetime, you unbox the reactor modules, stuff them back on a pair of trucks and send them back to the factory to be rehabbed, while dropping a fresh unit into place.

Unless we go full-Idiocracy (which we may...God help us...), time and education on this will (hopefully) win out.
Click to expand...

That's fine. So how long will it take you to educate the masses so that they'll allow a reactor in their town? 10 years? 20? More? I know people who are pretty smart and on all sides of the political spectrum that don't want nuclear near them.

I personally think we need a blend of technologies and Nuclear will likely be part of it, but I don't see any desire among the masses for nuclear. Any shot it had died with Fukishima and yes that was old tech, but for the foreseeable future, I don't see that changing. For now, wind, solar and perhaps sea turbines are more acceptable.
 
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