Cad
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What fucking factories are you talking about. I'm talking about replacing american coal and oil power plants with nuclear power plants. Nothing is being driven overseas.
Energy Thread - How to Power Civilization
- Thread starter Strifen
- Start date
I would think utility costs would factor into profitability. But I get what you're saying; the only thing holding nuclear back is the people on this forum.
Eomer
Trakanon Raider
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I'd just like to point out that up until about 5 years ago, Canada was the world's largest uranium producer. I think it's actually within the realm of possibility that the majority of the uranium mined in human history actually came from Canada. And last I checked, our mines are pretty safe.
In any case, we've pretty much got every energy source on lock down, other than solar, owing to our stupid latitude. But natural gas, coal, oil, hydro, tidal, wind, and nuclear? We have it and we're willing to dig it out of the ground and sell it to you friendly Americans!
In any case, we've pretty much got every energy source on lock down, other than solar, owing to our stupid latitude. But natural gas, coal, oil, hydro, tidal, wind, and nuclear? We have it and we're willing to dig it out of the ground and sell it to you friendly Americans!
Chanur
Shit Posting Professional
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They are putting up some GE 1.7 wind turbines out near my house. I was driving by the other day just as they started flying the rotor. Got a couple of pictures but they are not great since I was driving.
All the more reason Canada needs to be number 52!
All the more reason Canada needs to be number 52!
Dyvim
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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You keep missing the point, the clean Uranium isnt clean as they make it sound.
Also no idea where you getting the 10% usable Uranium figure (cause it fucking needs to get enriched because its like less than 1% usable).
Lithose
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His point, in general, is that it's much cleaner than coal; which it is. You guys, I don't know, assumed that everyone in this thread thought it came from green fairies or something, such a blindingly large straw man that it's almost obscene. The difference between coal mining waste, and uranium mining waste is enormous, it's not even on the same level. If you look at the uranium waste, it can actually have soil and growth over it, the worst aspects being radon release (But that's not different from normal in these areas, due to the uranium in the ground). Coal slurry though is a toxic shit pile that literally needs to be damned in a pit. The scales of the environmental effects are enormously different--and so, it's pretty easy to say, Uranium mining is relativelyvery cleanby comparison.
Also, yes, U-235 is only sub 1% of uranium, but reactors don't need pure 100% 235. It only needs to be enriched from 1% to 5% concentration.
Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Yeah, really no different from any other mining since at the end of the day any mining is going to produce waste and toxic byproducts. Difference being you need a hell of a lot less uranium compared to coal.
Although I know there have been issues in north eastern Arizona/NM/Utah with uranium mining but that sounds more like shitty corporations being shitty corporations and the .gov doing nothing about it.
BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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I saw an entire train carrying nothing but turbine blades going through western Montana the other day. It was a pretty impressive site, those things are huge.
Agraza
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They should offer money to the locals to dodge nimby like the oil guys in Alaska do. I assume these wind farms generate far more power than the consumption of whatever bumfuck county they're setting up in. Give those guys a break on their bill, maybe some electrical engineering scholarships, etc. and they'll be all "pick me, pick me".
Erronius
Macho Ma'am
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A big problem is how differently a nuke plant is regulated and treated as opposed to other plants like coal. I had the chance to tour a local power plant while it was shutdown for rebuild (which has to happen on a regular basis). So on one hand we got to see how much money they have to invest on everything from baghouses to particle separating vortex housings, which is pretty obscene when you walk through it. I think for this power plant (coal) they were telling us that they'd invested 1-2 billion in technology to cut emissions and that they still had to worry about meeting government regs.
I asked about their take on nuclear, particularly in regards to the Wolf Creek plant, especially in light of all the expenses and regulations that they have in regards to coal. And from what we were told, coal was still preferable to investing in nuclear if for no other reason than the regulations and restrictions on nuclear were so much more than for coal (which is already highly regulated) that it sounded like one of the biggest hurdles would be getting power companies to invest in them (and they own a large share in the Wolf Creek plant already).
They also were telling us that because of EPA regs in regards to coal that a lot of the coal they use has to be low-sulpher coal shipped in from the west, because they couldn't afford to keep burning much of the high sulpher coal that we can get locally. KCPL had a coal plant down in LaCygne because there was a huge coal mine right there, but a couple decades ago when the EPA added more and more regulations in regards to sulfer dioxide, KCPL was put into a position where they couldn't use the coal from there because it was high-sulfer but they were also trapped in a long-term contract that stated that they would only burn coal from that mine in their power plant and the power plant was the mine's sole customer. As a result KCPL was forced to buy the mine outright and close the mine in order to get out of the contract and that was really their cheapest option (and it wasn't cheap I don't think).
I think that particular plant has an exception where it can still burn a low % of higher sulpher coal but last I heard they are going to upgrades to other plants so that they can upgrade that one to get away from high sulpher altogether.
iannis
Musty Nester
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That thorium documentary showed that nuclear is even a tough sell in Canada. Construction and maintenance creates fewer local jobs and the up front investment is higher. And that was in fuckin' Canada.
It's gonna take some kind of insane subsidy to get America interested. Which is really sad. But the fearmongering over nuclear waste was extremely effective.
It's gonna take some kind of insane subsidy to get America interested. Which is really sad. But the fearmongering over nuclear waste was extremely effective.
Cad
I'm With HER ♀
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I get my info from xkcd, but this info about the spent fuel pools basically made me realize that people are being completely ridiculous about spent nuclear fuel. Putting it in water basically makes it completely not dangerous to us. To the point where you could swim in a pool with the shit in it and be fine.
Spent Fuel Pool
What the fuck guys. Water. Probably the most plentiful shit on the entire planet. And nuclear waste is an intractable problem, so lets go ahead and spew a few billion tons of shit in the air every year, that can't be harmful, right?
Spent Fuel Pool
What the fuck guys. Water. Probably the most plentiful shit on the entire planet. And nuclear waste is an intractable problem, so lets go ahead and spew a few billion tons of shit in the air every year, that can't be harmful, right?
Big Phoenix
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Cad
I'm With HER ♀
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Yea, when you build a reactor with no containment building, turn the safeties off and run a reactor with really weird positive-feedback loops at redline to test things, if it blows up it blows up big and makes a right mess.
Check the Russian navy's nuclear record, they suck there too. I agree I wouldn't buy Russian designed and built reactors.
Check the Russian navy's nuclear record, they suck there too. I agree I wouldn't buy Russian designed and built reactors.
Cad
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Didn't they also change operators in the middle of the test? It was like a fucking black comedy the number of errors they made in a row.
Lithose
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Yep, and the funny thing is the fast breeder reactors, like one of the prototypes built in France--can actually USE this "waste" to fuel themselves. And they are so efficient that they reduce the radiation in the fuel by 99%. What's left is only radioactive for 200 years; and after that, it's completely inert. A typical containment canister buried in the desert is fine. So if we built even a few fast breeders, we could actually use up the waste of our current LWR's.
An extra reminder: A typical coal plant puts out more radiation every year than a typical fission plant. How?
Well, like everything else, coal is slightly radioactive so burning it just throws all that very low level radiation up and out the chimney (or into an ash pile or whatever). Burning it on an industrial scale produces this...radioactive wasteon an industrial scale.
Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste - Scientific American
Aaron
Goonsquad Officer
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I used to be anti-nuclear until I started reading up on these modern and theoretical reactors. While I still think you need some strong psychiatric medication if you want to build and run one of the old school reactors of the Fukushima/Chernobyl variant, these new ones look damn sexy. We need to invest more in these fuckers.