Drill New Oil Reserves Or Go Nuclear?

[CKRNZ]

I say go nuclear...We have several reactors in SC and one more being built by Duke Energy and I would bet our power costs are well below the national average..Duke claims atleast 21% below national average..and I believe them.Our last electric bill was 89 bucks and thats running everything..drier,electirc range,you name it...plus winter heating via electric...bill only went up to around $109 during the winter...compare that to our neighbors to the west and north..


I say nuclear is safer and more enviromental than oil.seeing as their are technologies that can effectively remove the by products of nuclear energy..clean off the earth for that matter...via that useless shuttle program we spend billions on..use it as a air-borne trash truck.sending the waste on a crash course with the sun.


also technology advancements have made meltdowns like chernobyl..which was due to russian mismanagment more than anything...unthinkable here...hell france is like 80% nuclear.


sure it doesnt solve the gas problem completely..buty it would lower costs greatly over time..due to less fossil fuel being used for electricity.

[OneThirty8]

use it as a air-borne trash truck.sending the waste on a crash course with the sun.

I realize that any projectile sent from earth is going to be miniscule in comparison to the size and power of the sun, but I'd still say let's not screw with the sun. If we screw up the sun, we don't even the option of trying to take refuge on Mars. If we screw up the earth, heck, I'm pretty sure there are at least regions on Mars that aren't too hot or too cold, (unlike Venus or Mercury, which would cook us, or some of the moons around the gas giants, which would turn us into mansicles) and it's a terrestrial planet, and unlike Venus, its atmosphere isn't full of sulfuric acid...

As for your idea, I'm up for exploring any possibility that eliminates or reduces our need for oil. The problem is convincing politicians and energy companies that switching from oil to something else is the way to go. People are getting rich on the stuff, and they want to continue to do so until there's no more oil to be had.

[JS Lemming]

So.... you want to load a shuttle with the most deadly vile crap on earth... strap a huge hydrogen bomb to its side and hope it doesn't blow up in the atmosphere?

[Prophet][]

So.... you want to load a shuttle with the most deadly vile crap on earth... strap a huge hydrogen bomb to its side and hope it doesn't blow up in the atmosphere?

exactly what I was gonna say, and that is the real reason they don't do it.

But I do agree with going nuclear. It is not the devil everyone seems to think it is. Hell, even the greenpeace founder said he was wrong about nuclear power being bad.

[Veggita2099]

PRoblems with Nuclear is safety concerns, and you still have pollution from nuclear waste. Nuclear waste stays for a long time (like 100's of years I think) and can have terrible effects on people near it. Its all fine and dandy if you can keep it sealed off but the first earth quake or shift in the ground is all it takes to release the stuff.

Then of course if the plant has a melt down you might as well have a nuclear bomb go off.

[hearld500]

Within the last few months, the power company set up about 120 wind turbines about an hour from my house. Places like this where these turbines are viable, I think they should be used as much as possible. There are also several hydroelectric dams in the area, which is where most of the power comes from, which is both enviromentally friendly and safe.

In areas where there isn't places for hydroelectric dams or enough wind, nuclears just fine.

Only problem is, you won't be seeing nuclear or electric cars going mainstream anytime soon, so oil is going to be around for awhile.

[Prophet][]

PRoblems with Nuclear is safety concerns, and you still have pollution from nuclear waste. Nuclear waste stays for a long time (like 100's of years I think) and can have terrible effects on people near it. Its all fine and dandy if you can keep it sealed off but the first earth quake or shift in the ground is all it takes to release the stuff.

Then of course if the plant has a melt down you might as well have a nuclear bomb go off.

The waste can be sotred safely and plant meltdowns just don't happen anymore, they are really safe. The Three mile island accient happened years ago but proved that new (for the time) safety measures worked. besides that there has only ever been 1 total meltdown.

[mikozero]

PRoblems with Nuclear is safety concerns, and you still have pollution from nuclear waste. Nuclear waste stays for a long time (like 100's of years I think) and can have terrible effects on people near it. Its all fine and dandy if you can keep it sealed off but the first earth quake or shift in the ground is all it takes to release the stuff.

Then of course if the plant has a melt down you might as well have a nuclear bomb go off.

The waste can be sotred safely and plant meltdowns just don't happen anymore, they are really safe. The Three mile island accient happened years ago but proved that new (for the time) safety measures worked. besides that there has only ever been 1 total meltdown.

lets get something clear, 100's of years ?

Plutonium-239, which is in irradiated fuel, has a half-life of 24,400 years. It is dangerous for a quarter million years, or 12,000 human generations. As it decays, uranium-235 is generated; half-life: 710,000 years.

btw half-life means it with only be half as dangerous at that point, not in anyway 'safe'

how long do you think any kind of a 'barrel' can last ? (especially given that the levels of radioativity involved turn pretty much all materials known to man (over relatively short time) into something with the consistancy of styrofoam)


if we had any brains at all we'd be pumping money into ITER and the fusion reactor program, but we won't, why ?

because cheap free energy made from water with no nasty by-products is in no ones 'economic interest' (ie the companys that make you pay for it).

nuclear power is the most expensive option in every way possible - each unit of electricity generated costs over 3 times more than any equivalent (the idea of cheap nuclear power is a myth), and the provisions for long term waste storage costs is a (very unfunny) joke.

there are lots of clean energy sources that have very low or virtually no cost but they will never be built because there would be virtually no money in it for the producers - straw powered power stations being one (don't laugh), Geothermal a huge (and untapped for the reasons stated above) other.

and btw i'm not esposing this view as a concerned environmentalist, i worked inside the industry we're discussing (or at least the near periphery).

[SuperMegatron]

Nuclear power isnt cheap but the price in a constant. Oil,coal,natural gas they all change with the market.The waste is a issue but a large portion of the nuclear fuel we will use is coming from converted nuclear weapons.So they fuel would need to be disposed of anyway. As for geothermal power that would require a huge investment so that makes it more of a turn off to the public the oil or coal. The real fuel of the future is methane. Some farms already run on the methane produced by their cows crap. All sewage plants atleast back home run on the methane produce by our crap and they burn off the excess.Between the methane we make with our human waste and the garbage we produce we could get 10% of our energy needs.

[JS Lemming]

I'm with mikozero. I was wondering why so little research has been going into fusion. I hope I never become so obsessed with money that I become like those fools. The concept of fusion is so perfect.

[toastman]

I'm with mikozero. I was wondering why so little research has been going into fusion. I hope I never become so obsessed with money that I become like those fools. The concept of fusion is so perfect.

Fusion isn't the problem.
Well, actually fusion is the problem. Because when you slam two atoms together at high enough speeds to make them join, energy is released.
On the order of a hydrogen bomb.
Harnessing that power without killing every single living soul on the planet is the problem, not generating fusion devices. That's the easy part.

[Roofus]

not generating fusion devices. That's the easy part.

Creating a sustainable fusion reactor is quite difficult. The way I've heard these things work is that they have a chamber that they fill with hydrigen plasma and then they compress the plasma with a magnetic field. The problem is the magnetic field. On the program I saw, the scientist compared sustaining a fusion reaction that way to "trying to hold jello with a rubber band." He also said that he didn't think fusion could be viable (i.e. safe) until they figure out how to control gravity and compress the plasma that way.

[Prophet][]

another current problem with fusion is that most techniques seems to use more power than they produce. So a fusion plant at the moment couldn't even power itself. I think only one experiment has been done where enough pwoer has been produced.

In any case, fusion power is a long way off. If only we had warp core to study.

[Covar]

another current problem with fusion is that most techniques seems to use more power than they produce. So a fusion plant at the moment couldn't even power itself. I think only one experiment has been done where enough pwoer has been produced.

In any case, fusion power is a long way off. If only we had warp core to study.

hence why the greatest achievement for a nuclear scientist would be to discover "cold fusion," a cost effective method to create it. the only instances of cold fusion in our history have been hoaxes.

[Lartrak]

There are also several hydroelectric dams in the area, which is where most of the power comes from, which is both enviromentally friendly and safe

Guess it depends on where you're coming from as to whether it is environmentally friendly. Depending on how it is done, it usually submerges a ton of land which was formely inhabited by people and animals, thus destroying the environment. It also screws with the ecosystem of the river in most cases.

But once it is in place, yeah.

[Ex-Cyber]

First of all, this is not news.

Now that that's out of the way:

meltdowns like chernobyl..which was due to russian mismanagment more than anything

That seems to clearly be a major factor, but from what I've read the reactor design also had several flaws that made it prone to meltdown.

Plutonium-239, which is in irradiated fuel, has a half-life of 24,400 years. It is dangerous for a quarter million years, or 12,000 human generations.

As far as I've heard, the primary danger from plutonium is not from radioactivity but from chemical toxicity (basically the same as lead). The waste isotopes I usually see cited as radiation concerns are strontium-90 and cesium-137, which have half-lives of 28.79 years and 30.07 years respectively. Cs-137 also has a bunch of medical, scientific, and industrial applications, so it might be recycled if it could be feasibly isolated from waste.

Nuclear power isnt cheap but the price in a constant.

No, it's not. Usable nuclear fuels are a scarce resource just like oil and coal are. The price may be less volatile today, but you can't guarantee that the situation would be the same in a world dominated by nuclear power. The same could be said of virtually any fuel, which is yet another argument for exploring systems using a variety of power sources.

The real fuel of the future is methane.

That makes sense for the applications you mention, but wouldn't it be relatively difficult to transport and store methane? I can see how it might offset the demand for oil/coal, but it certainly wouldn't be a viable replacement for other applications. Maybe ethanol could come in here, but I don't know how practical large-scale ethanol production is or what other technical issues come into the implementation. I'm sure we can ask ethanol production experts like Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, and Johnnie Walker to weigh in, though.

Nuclear power isnt cheap but the price in a constant.

No, it's not. Usable nuclear fuels are a scarce resource just like oil and coal are. The price may be less volatile today, but you can't guarantee that the situation would be the same in a world dominated by nuclear power. The same could be said of virtually any fuel, which is yet another argument for exploring systems using a variety of power sources.

He also said that he didn't think fusion could be viable (i.e. safe) until they figure out how to control gravity and compress the plasma that way.

The physics professor here mentioned this, something to the effect of "The best fusion reactor is a gravitationally contained one, and here's how you make one of those: get a huge amount of hydrogen, put it in a big ball about 93 million miles away..."

[|darc|]

I say nuclear is safer and more enviromental than oil.seeing as their are technologies that can effectively remove the by products of nuclear energy..clean off the earth for that matter...via that useless shuttle program we spend billions on..use it as a air-borne trash truck.sending the waste on a crash course with the sun.

If we try to do anything, we should solve the energy problem once and for all. Our energy source needs not only to be renewable but recycleable. And any program that sends matter out into space reduces the mass of the Earth... it may be a miniscule amount over thousands of years, but eventually we will run out of resources.

[Ex-Cyber]

If we try to do anything, we should solve the energy problem once and for all.

There's surely a Nobel Prize in Physics in it for you if you can figure out how to get more energy out of a system than you put into it.

[|darc|]

If we try to do anything, we should solve the energy problem once and for all.

There's surely a Nobel Prize in Physics in it for you if you can figure out how to get more energy out of a system than you put into it.

I mean as long as the Sun exists.

[Ex-Cyber]

Fair enough. In that vein, I found out about concentrator-based solar plants not too long ago, and I think they're a pretty neat idea, although probably still too expensive for widespread deployment at the moment. The basic idea is that you set up a big array of parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight onto a vessel (pipe/tank) containing a compound capable of storing a lot of thermal energy (the plant I read about, called "Solar Two", used a mix of sodium chloride and potassium chloride aka salt and No-Salt). The focusing of a large area's worth of sunlight onto the containing vessel allows reaching rather high temperatures (enough to melt the aforementioned salt mixture, which I think is somewhere around 400C). The liquid medium is then used to transfer heat to a conventional steam turbine setup. This isn't especially efficient in the strictest sense, but the advantage of using the medium is that it reaches a much higher temperature than the boiling point of water. This, combined with the thermal mass of the medium, acts as a kind of battery so that the plant's output can stay consistent even with varying sunlight input (assuming it's enough overall to keep the medium liquid, of course). As far as I know, these have no waste products except the waste from manufacturing the plant components and perhaps stuff used in maintenance...