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[Oliolli]

I've been thinking... How would nuclear winter affect global warming? Set off around 60 nukes in the largest industrial centers of the world. Stop the CO₂ from industry and start a nuclear winter...

All we'd need would be Vaults

And extra water chips

[wierd]

Modern reactor designs are passively cooled. This means that as long as there is water in the coolant tanks, it cannot chain react into a meltdown.

Solar, wind, and geothermal energy do not have sufficient energy density to replace oil as the staple energy source. They are simply inferior by the numbers. Nuclear and fusion are the only contenders.

*edit

Concerning nuclear winter as a solution to climate change:

At least as far as earth is concerned, runaway greenhouse gas levels will result in atmospheric water vapor levels creating global cloud cover, which is essentially what nuclear winter is, minus the fallout. The increased albedo creates what is called a "snowball earth".  Recent examinations of earth's fossil record suggests that this has happened before.  It is a kind of "super iceage" that freezes the entire earth solid, or at least mostly solid.  Atmospheric greenhouse gas levels would have to be out of control for that to happen though. Far more likely is that an ordinary iceage will occur, atmospheric greenhouse levels will remain sufficiently high after the mass snow-out that warming to temperate levels will rapidly happen, followed by a climactically unstable period where global temperatures fluctuate while carbon gets resequestered.

Or, we can just admit that greenhouse gas levels are a problem, and proactively start scrubbing the atmosphere.

[treczoks]

Modern reactor designs are passively cooled. This means that as long as there is water in the coolant tanks, it cannot chain react into a meltdown.

Indeed the modern designs are much safer, but it is still dangerous because of the radiation during the process and the radioactive waste afterwards. And you cannot terminally rule out an accident which leads to coolant loss.

Solar, wind, and geothermal energy do not have sufficient energy density to replace oil as the staple energy source. They are simply inferior by the numbers. Nuclear and fusion are the only contenders.

There is a lot of solar, wind, and water energy still untapped, so this part is way underrepresented. The Europeans plan large solar power installations in the northern African desert. The US could plaster a good part of Nevada in similar ways.

What I'm currently keeping a close eye on is LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction). An engineer by the name of Andrea Rossi claims to have harnessed a Ni+H=Cu nuclear fusion reaction, and showed some results that at least are worth to observe. He is said to build a factory to build those e-cat devices as water heaters somewhere in the US. There are critics who claim it is a scam, but so far this would be a big, expensive and rather pointless scam. If he really delivers, though, his invention will be THE NEXT BIG THING (a 10kW water heater/central heating element for your home for $600-$800, and $100 of fuel/year to keep it going). As this device is designed to run continuously, excess heat could pe turned into locally generated electrical power.

Yours, Christian

[wierd]

Sadly nickel is not a very common transition metal, and the reaction is not reversable.

More interesting would be "exotic" solutions, like passive "photo-betavoltaic" power generation.

(Basically, you take a beta emitter, like carbon 14 or tritium gas, and use it with a rare-earth phosphor powder, like those used in a CFL lightbulb. The natural decay of the beta emitter will make a continuous, and safe (beta particles are just high speed electrons, and are stopped by paper and a few centimeters of air) light source, that can be coupled to a photovoltaic device like a high efficiency solar cell. The device will function continually for as long as the beta emitter stays hot.

Direct betavoltaics are not currently feasable, since the speed/energy of the emitted electrons are too high for existing semiconductor junctions to survive. The semiconductor breaks down, and they cease to produce energy. By mediating the exchange with an atomic photon source, you eliminate the breakdown at a cost in efficiency.

On the plus side, the emitted spectrum will be very specific to the phosphor used, so a very wavelenth specific photocollector can be used. Some of the existing collector chemistries are as efficient as 98% within specific frequency bands. This makes the idea theoretically employable.

[Ross Vernal]

Fusion, I agree, but let's see someone go invent that. I'm not against nuclear power, because I suspect that it'll lead to fusion. I'm just against it being the way to replace oil, or being built in stupid locations. Or next to people.

In the meantime, we have all of these technologies that are here, right now. We know that they generate energy, and that whatever energy they create can reduce oil use. We know we will need to reduce oil use. So... why, exactly, do we not pursue this in favor of a more dangerous alternative?


Technology improves over time and use. If we start on the renewable path now en masse, where do you think we'll be in five years? Ten? Twenty? When your grandkids are your age now?

[Oliolli]

I'm not against nuclear power... I'm just against it...being built...next to people.

I'd actually like to live next to a NPP.

[Vehudur]

Alright, there are a stupid number of misconceptions regarding nuclear power in this thread.

Indeed the modern designs are much safer, but it is still dangerous because of the radiation during the process and the radioactive waste afterwards. And you cannot terminally rule out an accident which leads to coolant loss.

Actually, in the event of a coolant failure a "nuclear poison" is injected automatically before the coolant even begins to boil away, this nuclear poison absorbs all the excess neutrons without shedding any itself and limits heat produced to decay of the products of the main fission reactions.  This amount of heat is readily dissipated by modern reactor designs just by radiant heat and basic air convection around it.   So in a modern reactor, even if you cut the coolant to it you're still not going to have a meltdown.

Also, we can reprocess waste and have low-level waste* and new nuclear fuel.
*Low level nuclear waste is very easy to dispose of.  In fact, it's not even really that dangerous.  You still wouldn't want to bathe in the stuff, but just being near it isn't dangerous.

There is a lot of solar, wind, and water energy still untapped, so this part is way underrepresented. The Europeans plan large solar power installations in the northern African desert. The US could plaster a good part of Nevada in similar ways.

The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow, tidal power is really impractical and just about every place where we could build a hydroelectric dam is either protected or already has one.  In northern Africa they're going to have serious problems with dust accumulation on the panels.  Not to mention the difficulties of extreme long range power transmission are going to make it extremely expensive.

On top of that,

What I'm currently keeping a close eye on is LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction). An engineer by the name of Andrea Rossi claims to have harnessed a Ni+H=Cu nuclear fusion reaction, and showed some results that at least are worth to observe. He is said to build a factory to build those e-cat devices as water heaters somewhere in the US. There are critics who claim it is a scam, but so far this would be a big, expensive and rather pointless scam. If he really delivers, though, his invention will be THE NEXT BIG THING (a 10kW water heater/central heating element for your home for $600-$800, and $100 of fuel/year to keep it going). As this device is designed to run continuously, excess heat could pe turned into locally generated electrical power.

Yours, Christian

No.  There are a hundred problems with it, and the fact that it just flat out doesn't work like he claims is the biggest of them.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Not nuclear power. Too many problems. Even if you trust computers and people enough to where a meltdown is impossible (and I trust neither), you're forgetting acts of God and sheer human incompetence. Like, say, building a reactor on a fault line. Not to mention storage of waste, getting the stuff out of the ground, the inevitable cancer that occurs as a result, inevitable accidents from transport and storage, terrorism, etc, etc. Not to mention: non-renewable resource.

For modern reactor designs there is zero risk of a meltdown.  Human incompetence and acts of "god" can only cause problems if there is a weakness in the design to begin with.  A reactor is basically a big ball of metal, even if the fault line was literally directly under it the most you'd do is shear it away from its base.   Waste reprocessing pretty much negates waste storage and only requires a small amount of "fresh" material.  Everything gives you cancer, you're being paranoid.  Did you know there is radioactive material naturally in your body?  Mostly carbon and phosphorus.

Transport and storage problems?  Have you SEEN the containers they store this shit in?  You can have a train slam into them at full speed and you will only mildly inconvenience it.  And the designs are getting better and better.  No, really: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4

Modern containment buildings for modern nuclear reactors are built with terrorism in mind.  In fact, one of the proof tests after it's built and before anything is put into it is to fly a remote controlled 747 into it.  All that does is create minor spalling on the concrete.  Sure, you could probably nuke it, but it'd have to be a big bomb (100kt+) and after a ground-burst nuke of that size the additional contamination from the nuclear reactor is going to be minor compared to that from the bomb.

It isn't renewable, sure, but there's so much of it** and so little of it is actually needed that we'll have evolved into an entirely new species before we run out.  Even if the entire world was powered by nuclear power.

**Uranium is very common, and thorium is even more common and safer when those designs are mastered.

And before you say fukushima, that reactor was built in the 60's and designed in the late 50's.  It's about the oldest design you could get that hadn't been shut down.  Chernobyl was a molten sodium cooled reactor with graphite control rods, which we now realize was really really fucking stupid. Three mile island was grossly blown out of proportion by the media, and it doesn't even really count as a meltdown because the reactor vessel wasn't breached.

Or next to people.

  You don't want it built next to you?  Despite the fact that "conventional" power plants release more radioactivity (due to isotopes contained in the fuels the burn) then a nuclear plant (which have very strict regulations)?  Ok, fine, but I'd rather live next to a nuclear plant because it is, quite bluntly, far safer.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So... why, exactly, do we not pursue this in favor of a more dangerous alternative?

  Because it's really really impractical and the "more dangerous alternative" (that is actually the safest power generation out there) is comparatively simple and cheap per unit of power.

I'm not against nuclear power... I'm just against it...being built...next to people.

I'd actually like to live next to a NPP.

You're better off there then next to a coal fired plant.  Or a wind farm, for that matter.

[wierd]

I am not against "green" energy, with the exception of biofuel from corn. (That's a shister's trick, which uses more energy in the supply line than it provides. Switchgrass ethanol, and algeal synthetic fuels are vastly superior.)

The problem is that they are not "dense" enough.  To get the energy output of a coal powerplant in the 50megawatt range, you would need almost a square mile of very premium realestate, and good fortunes in the weather if you went with solar. Not only that, but you would have to overproduce during daylight hours and store that energy in some fashion. Chemical batteries are horribly inefficient at this task, and break down with heavy cycling. There is some suggestion that solarpumped hydroelectric would be more efficient as a storage solution. (Basically, you use the wind/solar power during peak production hours to pump water uphill from one closed reservoir, into another one. This "stores" potential energy in the fluid's mass. When you need to supplement power during trough generation hours, you let the water flow from the uphill reservoir back into the downhill one, through a hydroelectric generator.) Both would require a sizable ad costly infrastructure investment that eats up physical realestate. The locations where you could build such power generation are naturally limited, compared to a coal fired plant, which theoretically can be placed almost anywhere (that people can tolerate it).

The issue with energy storage is especially poignant where "commuter transport" comes into play. 1 litre of petrolium has an energy density that totally dwarfs chemical batteries. This means that in order to replace a 30gal tank of gas as the power source in a typical american car, you have to replace it with a half ton of batteries. The added weight increases the resistance of the car by addining inertial mass, which reduces the energy efficiency of the vehicle by an alarming degree.  For this reason, short of a passive and compact nuclear battery, an electric car will never have the drivetimes of a gasoline or diesel powered one.

This is simply the dirty truth.  (I have seen MIT student built electric cars that run on hundreds of AA cells to get the high voltages needed to efficiently power an EV... my idea for a photobetavoltaic cell should be reasonably able to generate 1.5v equivalent from a tritium keyfob of comparable size and weight continually for 25 years. It should be possible to make a safe, passive nuclear powered EV using 100% consumer parts, as long as you don't mind driving a tank.)

[Loud Whispers]

Thread logic

Carp

->

Nuclear power

[Eddren]

Yeah, can't say I agree with people who assume that Nuclear power is bad. Not only do you have a practically non-existent chance of it ever melting down(We can't say there is absolutely no chance, because who knows, maybe something nobody would ever have expected to be even possible will happen,) but it's far more efficient, people can finally stop whining about saving the bloody animals, Uranium isn't going to kill all the fishes when dumped all over the ocean(It's fairly easy to clean up, after all. Put it all in a crate and it won't even escape.), you're actually looking at something that can be far, far more 'green' (Pah! Hippies.) then the conventional fuels right now, and better yet, it conserves SPACE. So you don't have to cry over overcrowding, either.

[Loud Whispers]

-snip-

New generation NPP are pretty fancy. Graphite bauble cooling systems

Still, you don't need a meltdown, just a failure and BEWM, no electricity, carp everywhere.

[Eddren]

That's true for everything, though.
Just look at Dwarven mechanics; you can build the plants perfectly, but one tantruming Dwarf, and look out, you just flooded your Fort.

[Oliolli]

Copper wiring from the NPP to the carp-infested waters.

*ZAP*

[Garath]

I believe research is done on making solar collectors in space. A lot of the energy from the sun is deflected by the athmosphere and the magnetic field. Yes it sounds like science fiction, and there is no reliable way to send the energy down, but hey, read some old 'fantasy' books, like Jules Verne. Flying to the moon, yeah right. And earlier, talking to someone miles away? I can't shout that hard. A bit later, "not without a wire".

Research is just starting on making efficient solar collectors, progress is made continuously.
In germany, a small village fitted all the roofs from their houses with solar collectors and they produce, as community, more energy than they need, year round, and sell off the excess. Yes, they were making a profit. I'll look for the news article, but I'm very sure. I imagine this to be slightly more effective in a hotter environment too.

I'm not saying it'll replace fuels, but it can seriously help preserve excisting supplies and is that not already praiseworthy?

energy collectors on roofs where there are many storms might get costly though. (thinking of tornado/hurricane scenarios)

[wierd]

Most of the problems with FUD surrounding nuclear power as being "teh badz" comes from outdated views about the state of fission energy reactors and the waste products they produce.

Specifically, when you say "fission reactor", most people think of an "OMG, it'll kill us all!!" Chernobyl or fukushima #1 type design, which runs on fissile uranium fuel, requires active coolant flow, and which produces high level waste.

Those designs are 60 years old. Nobody builds nuclear plants that way anymore. The designs that fission advocates want to have built are passively cooled, and spontaneously release neutron capture medium in the event of a coolant failure, and also have a fuel bed system that lacks sufficient fuel in the reaction chamber to go critical anyway. They are designed to use a uranium pellet kickstart, with neutron capture by thorium primary fuel, which converts the thorium slowly into fissile uranium as the reactor runs. They are unable to produce high level wastes, because the waste is used as catalyst to produce more fuel. The resulting waste product is low level waste, which can be used for all manner or applications requiring a radiological material. (Mostly things like RTGs and the like, but the far lower emissions and safer emission typs of the low level wase make storage much easier, and leakage far less worrisome.)

When proponents of nuclear power say they want to build a nuclear plant, it is this latter type design that they want built, because they generate more power, with less expensive fuel, and require far less maintenance, in addition to being downright next to impossible to blow up. (The fuel reaction is a slow exposure conversion process. Rapid excitation of the fuel would quickly burn out the fissile isotopes in the fuel bundle, and the reaction would stop. Thorium is not directly fissile in most of its isotopes. This means once the transmuted uranium "rind" burns off, it goes out. No more catalyzed fission, no explosion. The reactor requires slow, continual exposure of the thorium fuel bundle to the radiation of the small, contained reaction to transmute the thorium into a fissile fuel. The rate of consumption is balanced to be very close to exactly the rate of production. The fuel bundle goes in, and runs for the life of the fuel rod assembly. That's all she wrote.)

Detractors of nuclear power pull ancient events out of their asses, cry bloody murder about designs nobody wants to use, and actually want to replace, and generally spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt).

Similarly, nuclear detractors malign fusion energy research with the same nonsequitor arguments, despite the waste products of a fusion reactor being things like lithium, carbon, and oxygen in the worst case scenarios. (Usually its forms of helium as waste. Anything heavier than iron will vampirically drain a fusion reactor of the power it generates, so sodium, oxygen, and pals are about the heaviest waste that could be made without killing the reaction very quickly.) They also cite "risk of meltdown", despite the fact that fusion is **very hard** to sustain, and any breach of the reactor would just shoot a jet of hot hydrogen plasma out, and then shutdown. The hydrogen wouldn't even be all that radioactive. Just electrically charged.

Eventually though, as we slide down the slope from peak oil production, while energy demand continues to rise, the NIMBYs will have to be put down and told to put up or shut up.

They have nearly single handedly painted us into a very perilous corner where nuclear is about our only hope of escape, because "nuclear is teh badz!" When in reality it is now absurdly safe (far safer than flying in an airplane, in terms of risk of radiological exposure) and about the only thing that can wean us off oil and push us toward reliable fusion.