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Total Members Voted: 23

[wierd]

Of course. The whole damned planet is facing a serious man-made climate crisis because of fossil fuel reliance, and the top available contender is summarily eliminated because "oooh scary! Nuclear requires actual oversight and not just mere lipservice by government officials! Oh the humanity!" (Since the ACTUAL reason for the fukushima meltdown was outright failure of the regulatory framework due to regulatory capture and general political clusterfuck that happens when actual oversight goes byebye.)

In other news, water is wet.

I just fucking love humanity.   Don't you?

[Reelya]

Lifetime emissions for nuclear power vs output energy is a lot worse than solar or wind. A rough estimate is that nuclear produces 4 times the CO2 than solar per KW:

http://timeforchange.org/co2-emission-nuclear-power-stations-electricity

This leads to an interesting issue: The world-wide reserves for Uranium are a very limited resource. It is estimated to last for about 50 to 70 years with the current demand. If additional nuclear reactors are built, the supply will last correspondingly shorter.

Basically, at current usage, uranium ores will be depeted, call this 60 years. Clearly, if we build a huge amount of exta plants, that gets much sooner. Nuclear makes up 13% of current world generation. If we, say, build enough nuclear plants to power 50% of the world, then that would quadruple the rate of uranium depletion, meaning total depletion of known sources within 15 years. If the plants have a 15 year lifespan, then up the average CO2 output per plant accordingly (since much of the CO2 cost is in building nuclear plants).

The alternative is that we mine low-grade ores, and process them into high-grade ores, or find some way to get uranium from seawater. All these ways however will expend much more energy than current mining does (otherwise, we would do them already), and more energy needed to get the uranium pushes up the CO2 emissions of the entire process in equal measure.

[wierd]

Sadly, solar and wind are not really applicable in many places where lots of humans live. Many parts of Europe are purpetually shaded by mountains, and the temperate climate mitigates high wind, making wind generation less viable.

A ban on nuclear would likely have chilling effects on fusion research, and fusion is where the game really needs to be pointed.

All that combined with lack of high efficiency energy transfer from places that ARE blessed with good solar and wind prospects to those without, and the purpetual state of fusion being "in the next 50 years! (if we actually, you know, GET FUNDING, as opposed to right now, where we get basically DICK)", means that we can pretty much expect the climate apocolypse.

[Arx]

the top available contender

Sadly, solar and wind are not really applicable in many places where lots of humans live. Many parts of Europe are purpetually shaded by mountains, and the temperate climate mitigates high wind, making wind generation less viable..

Solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuel generators in Germany and the UK, actually. I imagine it'll spread.

[wierd]

But it is not viable everywhere. Fusion would be, and fusion is (gasp *horror*) a form a nuclear energy.

Not to mention the ecological dangers that grabbing up all that sunlight away from surface plantlife (if solar were really, truly, aggressively invested in as the primary source of electrical power) would introduce. Look at the consequences of flipping SUNSCREEN on coral reefs, for example.

[Reelya]

Nuclear/fission isn't getting around the uranium shortage sorry. Building the plants produces a metric shit-ton (because it's Europe) of CO2 - it's all front-loaded with nuclear and you get the benefit in the long run. However, with only 60 years supply at current demand, basing the entire show on it would cause known deposits to run out in under a decade if it entirely replaced coal. Sure, uranium power advocates then say "once technology improves then low-grade ores will be viable", but in how long? And if we build more uranium power right now, we have even less time to work out how to efficiently extract those sources (meaning it won't happen before the plants are kaput).

I don't think a moritorium on new fission plants will prevent fusion research. Uranium plants provide exactly fuck-all useful research data on how to build fusion plants. Also, energy providers who use uranium...exactly how much of the profit goes into fusion research? They're not exactly lining up to fund things like the ITER project in France. Power-generation companies do not fund fusion research. If you take away their nuclear plants however, then they'd begin to be interested.

BTW, has Britain considered "Rain Power". Push all the rain through turbines. They'd be the world's #1 power generator.

[wierd]

This is true--

The thing I have issue with, is that the issues with solar and wind (the major one being lack of efficient energy transport) are very much endemic, and there is no real viable alternative to nuclear generation besides straight up fossil fuel based generators in many localities as a consequence.

I could see provisions to prevent installation of fission reactors in areas that can be effectively serviced through other, non-fossil-fuel based means, but still leaving nuclear in areas that cannot be effectively serviced otherwise.  A straight up all-out ban is foolish, imho.

Also, it is important to weigh in the lay public's understanding of the reason for the nuclear moratorium.  Many ordinary people, regardless of locality (yes, I know the US is statistically the least literate when it comes to science), do not really comprehend the serious difference between a potential fusion based power plant, and a dirty "makes waste that is radioactive of hundreds of thousands of years!" fission plant.  They hear "nuclear" and their buttholes tighten.

[Arx]

But it is not viable everywhere. Fusion would be, and fusion is (gasp *horror*) a form a nuclear energy.

I don't think anyone who complains about fission would complain about fusion. Fission has major downsides not present in fusion.

Many ordinary people, regardless of locality (yes, I know the US is statistically the least literate when it comes to science), do not really comprehend the serious difference between a potential fusion based power plant, and a dirty "makes waste that is radioactive of hundreds of thousands of years!" fission plant.  They hear "nuclear" and their buttholes tighten.

...source?

[Baffler]

Basically, at current usage, uranium ores will be depeted, call this 60 years. Clearly, if we build a huge amount of exta plants, that gets much sooner. Nuclear makes up 13% of current world generation. If we, say, build enough nuclear plants to power 50% of the world, then that would quadruple the rate of uranium depletion, meaning total depletion of known sources within 15 years. If the plants have a 15 year lifespan, then up the average CO2 output per plant accordingly (since much of the CO2 cost is in building nuclear plants).

This is simply not true. Current demand with current hardware, based on high grade uranium ore alone, will last about 200 years. We also have another 700 years worth of fuel bound up in phosphate ores that aren't quite economical to extract, but will be once the above starts running low. 900 years is already a decent amount of time (scaling up generation to 50% as you've done we'd end up with about 250 years, which you will note is longer than oil has lasted us), but the first article also points out that we have 30,000 years worth of fuel if we modernize our reactors, and another 60,000 if we work out seawater extraction. I'm not holding out hope for the seawater extraction happening any time soon, but our reactors are already well past their original expiration dates.

And that's if we don't start using fast-breeder reactors, which can utilize U-238 as a fuel source. It isn't quite as efficient, but that's another 30,000 years worth of fuel going by currently known uranium reserves (U-238 is about 99.3% of the uranium mined, while the U-235 that we currently use as fuel only accounts for 0.7% of what we pull out of the ground. 200 years is 0.7% of ~30,000.)

Edit: citation was wrong, rejiggered figure.

[Reelya]

the figure I posted was correct for known sources. The figure you have is for hypothesized sources. Going off known sources in your link gives 79 years, which is close to my link. Are we going to base the future of our entire species on guesses or known things?

Also, since the estimates come from the NEA, with obvious close ties to the nuclear industry that you get in such things (the entire body is pretty much dependent on nuclear industry for their jobs to exist), you should definitely look at bias in their estimates. It's like listening to the DEA about the drug problem back in the 1930's.

[wierd]

Arx: (my bad)

It is very much related to the NIMBY phenomenon. Even if they DO understand fusion-vs-fission, the lay public is very much opposed to its deployment (in general). NIMBYism is not about being rational or well educated. it's about wanting a castle in the sky. No place on earth if free from humans acting irrationally.

For clarity, NIMBYism affects even the renewables you are preaching for.
http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/nimby

Dont underestimate the political pull that a vocal minority can have, especially when it comes to much needed infrastructure change.

[Baffler]

the figure I posted was correct for known sources. The figure you have is for hypothesized sources. Going off known sources in your link gives 79 years, which is close to my link. Are we going to be the future of our entire species on guesses or known things?

Also, since the estimates come from the NEA, with obvious close ties to the nuclear industry that you get in such things (the entire body is pretty much dependent on nuclear industry for their jobs to exist), you should definitely look at bias in their estimates. It's like listening to the DEA about the drug problem back in the 1930's.

The figure you posted was for known economical sources, though I note that they left that detail out. There's a lot more in known deposits, it's just slighter easier to get at those 60 years worth than the rest. And it takes a lot of audacity to attack my sources (such enormously biased institutions like Scientific American, and Stanford University, or did you only open one of them?) for having a pro-nuclear bias when your numbers come from Time for Change.

[Sergarr]

the figure I posted was correct for known sources. The figure you have is for hypothesized sources. Are we going to be the future of our entire species on guesses or known things?

Have you looked up at the predictions of "when will oil reserves run out"? They've been at the state of "known oil reserves will run out in about 30-60 years" for more than half a century now.

[Sheb]

A German representative in the European parliament is first and foremost a representative of the German and only then a representative of the European people, and the same holds for the other countries. I guess there's no quick fix for this though.

I should go back and dig it up, but I remember that this is, in fact, not the case. With a few exceptions (Frenchmen voting to keep the Parliaments in Strasbourg, that kind of stuff), political parties are a much better predictor that country of origin if you're trying to predict which way a MEP will vote.

@Scriver: Well, yeah, my understanding was that you opposed the EU or more specifically the idea of a continental body with governemental power. Sorry if that wasn't the case.

[Reelya]

snip

Scientific American is just reporting the figures. All the cited figures come from the NEA. Where is Stanford referenced in your article? It mentions the dean of Maryland University, not Stanford, but he just quotes "If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources" so the dean of Maryland admits he's just repeating a press release, and scientific American is just verbatim stating "what he said".

Everything is therefore down to the NEA, not the people who reported their press release. NEA is also directly involved in overseeing the funding for new reactor research as part of the Gen IV reactor project. They have a financial stake in all this.