nuclear energy

[happythoughts 0]

So what's the poop? Is there a reason why we don't have a bunch of nukes producing electricity here?

Everybody in the stinkin world seems to have one.
People sitting on huge oil reserves are getting them.

Are there other problems than waste disposal ?

If plug-in hybrids become more common, the need for cheaper electricity could get pushed to the forefront.

[billvon 3,173]

>Is there a reason why we don't have a bunch of nukes producing electricity here?

1) they are more expensive than alternatives
2) there's a lot of public fear of them
3) until they open Yucca Mountain there's no place to store waste offsite

[akarunway 1]

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So what's the poop? Is there a reason why we don't have a bunch of nukes producing electricity here?

Everybody in the stinkin world seems to have one.
People sitting on huge oil reserves are getting them.

Are there other problems than waste disposal ?

If plug-in hybrids become more common, the need for cheaper electricity could get pushed to the forefront.

As Bill stated. A little more info>http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/nuclear-storage.html More reading if you are interested>http://www.top100energies.com/www.nukeworker.com.html

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

[sundevil777 102]

Nuclear plants tend to have shut-downs much more often than conventional power plants due to relatively small but common problems. At least that was the trend many years ago, and it certainly was the case for the Palo Verde reactors near Phoenix for several years after they were in service.

So far, I think all the hybrid cars don't need to be plugged in because they recharge themselves while cruising correct? Do any of them even have the ability to plug in?

If our electric meters could support price differences depending on the time of day and season (winter/summer), there would be a huge shift to reduce the actual peak demand, which is the real difficulty facing electric power production - meeting peak demand during the hottest part of summer days.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[billvon 3,173]

>If our electric meters could support price differences depending on
>the time of day and season (winter/summer), there would be a huge
>shift to reduce the actual peak demand . . .

Most commercial customers have this sort of billing; it's called time-of-use (TOU) billing. They also get cheaper power if they are willing to "shed" (i.e. drop off the grid) during power shortages.

[lawrocket 3]

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Are there other problems than waste disposal ?

This is the thing I don't quite understand. The biggest problem that people have with the impact of fossil fuels is that disposal of their waste products causes global climate change that threatens our very civilization. We just dispoe of wastes in the air, waters, landfills, etc.

Plug in technologies were, and probably still are, called "zero emission vehicles" that do nothing but transfer their waste disposal systems from tailpipes to smokestacks.

Ah, we could use hydroeletric power, but that means building dams to store the energy in pretty valleys. We'd even have a side-benefit of usable stored water for the populace - screw that, the environment needs protecting.

Solar Power is swell, too. And it is making huge strides.

Envirogenius Dubya is suggesting hyrdogen fuel cells. Awesome! How are we gonna get it? Through fossil fuel powered electrolysis? And then have our cars use it to generate wastewater that is, literally, waste water, THE leading greenhouse gas. Don't believe me? Compare SoCal to the South in summer. Water holds heat.

You've got bad air pollution problems in the Central Valley. How much could be helped by reopening Rancho Seco? Yes, heat pollution of the waters is a side effect. For the time being, I'll sacrifice a river for a planet.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[Jasmin 0]

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Nuclear plants tend to have shut-downs much more often than conventional power plants due to relatively small but common problems. At least that was the trend many years ago

If you trend average availability, nuclear actually competes very nicely.

Edited to add: From NEI- The median number of unplanned automatic scrams was zero per 7,000 critical hours for 2005.

xj

"I wouldn't recommend picking a fight with the earth...but then I wouldn't recommend picking a fight with a car either, and that's having tried both."

[billvon 3,173]

>And then have our cars use it to generate wastewater that is,
>literally, waste water, THE leading greenhouse gas. Don't believe me?
>Compare SoCal to the South in summer. Water holds heat.

Agreed. But compared to the 30 billion gallons a DAY of water used solely for irrigation in California (most of which ends up back in the air through transpiration) the water from burning hydrogen is negligible.

Hydrogen would be a decent fuel - if we had any. We don't.

[StreetScooby 5]

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Hydrogen would be a decent fuel

But, it blows up... I would be very leary of any hydrogen fuel source.

We are all engines of karma

[Jasmin 0]

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Solar Power is swell, too. And it is making huge strides.

If you calculate total life-cycle (eg POST, OECD numbers etc), solar actually contributes to more CO2 than wind, hydro and nuclear.

Until we find a way to extract Si for PV's at a lower temp or the emerging thin-film or semi-conductor technology progresses, I just don't see this changing.

Don't get me wrong, I truly like Solar's potential, but it just isn't there...yet!

xj

"I wouldn't recommend picking a fight with the earth...but then I wouldn't recommend picking a fight with a car either, and that's having tried both."

[akarunway 1]

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So what's the poop? Is there a reason why we don't have a bunch of nukes producing electricity here?

Everybody in the stinkin world seems to have one.
People sitting on huge oil reserves are getting them.

Are there other problems than waste disposal ?

If plug-in hybrids become more common, the need for cheaper electricity could get pushed to the forefront.

LOL. I thought it ws NUKLAR or NUKLEAR>http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/George_Dubya_Bush< Man that's some funny shit

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

[lawrocket 3]

Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer, always spoke of "newkewlar" power.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[NCclimber 0]

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LOL. I thought it ws NUKLAR or NUKLEAR>http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/George_Dubya_Bush< Man that's some funny shit

nu·cle·ar -or- noo'-klee-er

[lawrocket 3]

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If you calculate total life-cycle (eg POST, OECD numbers etc), solar actually contributes to more CO2 than wind, hydro and nuclear.

Which is a similar to saying, "If you look at voting totals, I've voted for more Republicans than Amazon." Probably totally true, yet my record of voting for Republicas is downright negligible.

And, other forms of energy productio cause other types of pollution, i.e., heat and flooding and eyesores. I actually wonder if, in 30 years, studies will reveal that wind power generation is causing cooling of the north pole and waming of the lower latitudes because of dissipation of the winds that are the earth's heat transfer mechanism. It sounds ludicrous today, but plenty of ludicrous-souning stuff has happened and, as a matter of physics, the mechanism is there...

Similarly, will pv cells contribute to global or localized cooling? Solar panels are like trees, only instead of creating carbohydrate and oxygen from sunlight, they create electricity, transforming the sun's heat, meaning less heat to heat the environment.

How does the production of CO2 with solar power compare to the production of CO2 by the metabolism of an individual person.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[kallend 2,219]

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If our electric meters could support price differences depending on the time of day and season (winter/summer), there would be a huge shift to reduce the actual peak demand, which is the real difficulty facing electric power production - meeting peak demand during the hottest part of summer days.

30 years ago when I lived in the UK my electricity meter did exactly that. How come the US can't do it?

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[sundevil777 102]

Of course it can be done, but the meters would have to be changed.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[StreetScooby 5]

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I actually wonder if, in 30 years, studies will reveal that wind power generation is causing cooling of the north pole and waming of the lower latitudes because of dissipation of the winds that are the earth's heat transfer mechanism.

I doubt that. The jet stream is a pretty dominant force in that area.

We are all engines of karma

[billvon 3,173]

>But, it blows up...

So does natural gas. Yet we have pipes of the stuff running through our homes.

The nice thing about gaseous fuels is that if you rupture a tank of the stuff, and it vents, after a few seconds there's no more hazard. As opposed to gasoline, which just sits there.

[billvon 3,173]

>solar actually contributes to more CO2 than wind, hydro and nuclear.

Wind - true.

Hydro - not true. The decaying matter you get at the bottom of the reservoir generates a significant amount of CO2. It's tiny compared to what a coal plant puts out, but far more significant than the CO2 used to generate the energy to make the panel.

Nuclear - true on a kilowatt-hour basis.

Edited to add - the only CO2 that a solar panel contributes to the atmosphere is the CO2 involved in generating the power to manufacture it. There is already a solar-powered PV plant that uses solar power to make solar panels; these panels contribute zero CO2 to the atmosphere during their manufacture, and thus beat nuclear as being CO2-neutral.)

[kallend 2,219]

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>solar actually contributes to more CO2 than wind, hydro and nuclear.

Wind - true.

Hydro - not true. The decaying matter you get at the bottom of the reservoir generates a significant amount of CO2. It's tiny compared to what a coal plant puts out, but far more significant than the CO2 used to generate the energy to make the panel.

Nuclear - true on a kilowatt-hour basis.

Maybe we could sequester the CO2 into diamonds...

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[Tornolf 0]

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Similarly, will pv cells contribute to global or localized cooling? Solar panels are like trees, only instead of creating carbohydrate and oxygen from sunlight, they create electricity, transforming the sun's heat, meaning less heat to heat the environment.

Possibly localized cooling, but I can't see solar panels causing global cooling all on their own. My brain is still fried from the thermo test I just got out of, but it seems to me that heat (Q) in and out of the planet, as a whole and on average, should be mostly equal. If it wasn't, there would be such large temperature fluctuations that we wouldn't be able to survive. Since 2nd Law of Thermo says that energy has a quality, and electricity is a higher quality than heat, using heat to create electricity can't be a 100% transfer. Since 1st Law of Thermo states conservation of energy, and since heat and electricity are both forms energy and thus can't be created or destroyed, we're going to end up with no net change in heat when the electricity is used.

So the energy in creating electricity would be something like:

q=heat w=work (electricity)

q(in) = q(out) + w(out) where q(in) > q(out).

Keep in mind that all this time on the larger scale:
Q(in) ~= Q(out), where Q is the heat energy entering and leaving the Earth and Q >>> q. Also take into account the amount of energy (heat) stored by the atmosphere and oceans.

Anyhow, when the work is expended and converted to the lower quality of energy (heat), we return to having the equal amount of heat that we started with since 100% of work can be converted to heat (but not vice-versa!!!). So unless we just started converting an incredibly massive amount of heat into electricity and storing it in batteries, the global temperature average should stay within normal fluctuations.

Basically it echoes what StreetScooby said about the Jet Stream. Since the surroundings around which the process occurs is so large, it can be assumed that the process does not alter the surroundings by any noticeable amount. Other than an increase in entropy, of course.

Then again, something unforseen could screw up the heat distribution on the planet causing some chain reaction which wipes out all life. I guess that was the point of your post though. Doesn't matter to me, because I needed something to justify that sleeping 5 hours in the past 3 days and still getting my ass kicked by the thermo test doesn't mean I didn't learn anything That and I refuse to delete all this after wasting a good half hour to make sure I had all of my assumptions properly based on universal laws!

A waddling elephant seal is the cutest thing in the entire world.
-TJ

[billvon 3,173]

>but it seems to me that heat (Q) in and out of the planet, as
>a whole and on average, should be mostly equal.

It is, mostly. We're recently perturbing that a few ways:

1) More CO2. CO2 doesn't block shortwave radiation coming in, but does block longwave radiation going out. That tips the balance a few watts per square meter positive.

2) Loss of sea ice. The warming effect of 1) melts sea ice. Sea ice is white; highly reflective. Seawater is darker; more absorptive. So more heat will be absorbed than previously.

3) Other albedo changes. Loss of forests can change albedo in either direction, depending on the underlying ground cover. Desert has a fairly high albedo; grasslands fairly low.

Solar panels have a fairly low albedo, since they are designed to capture (not reflect) light. Hence they absorb more solar energy total, and 100% of this energy gets converted to heat either at the solar panel itself or at the end load. However, that energy at the end load would have been provided by some other means, which means there's no savings there. In addition, a 30-40% efficient power plant made the power initially, and most of our power plants today are thermal plants - they generate a LOT of heat making that power.

So on the balance, solar power usage results in less heat in the enviroment. (Neglecting the effects of CO2 mitigation here.) However, it may affect the balance of heat between the former generation facility and the end user.

[Tornolf 0]

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Solar panels have a fairly low albedo, since they are designed to capture (not reflect) light. Hence they absorb more solar energy total, and 100% of this energy gets converted to heat either at the solar panel itself or at the end load. However, that energy at the end load would have been provided by some other means, which means there's no savings there. In addition, a 30-40% efficient power plant made the power initially, and most of our power plants today are thermal plants - they generate a LOT of heat making that power.

So on the balance, solar power usage results in less heat in the enviroment. (Neglecting the effects of CO2 mitigation here.) However, it may affect the balance of heat between the former generation facility and the end user.

So you're saying that solar panels will result in more heat being retained since they capture 100% of solar energy, which is more than any other thing (water, ice, forest, house, etc) that could be in its place. The way I'm reading it is that any type of power plant will result in an increase of heat in the system's surroundings (Earth), but solar power will increase it less than current carbon or nuclear based power plants? So q(out-solar) < q(out-other) for each watt of work produced?

A waddling elephant seal is the cutest thing in the entire world.
-TJ

[billvon 3,173]

>So you're saying that solar panels will result in more heat being
>retained since they capture 100% of solar energy . .

Well, they capture about 70% of the solar energy that hits them, and they convert about 16% of the energy to usable form. So you're left with a 54% "effective albedo." It's lower than a desert but much higher than asphalt.

So covering a desert with panels would make the area hotter, but covering a highway in the desert with panels would make the area cooler.

>but solar power will increase it less than current carbon or
>nuclear based power plants?

Basically yes.

[kallend 2,219]

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Similarly, will pv cells contribute to global or localized cooling? Solar panels are like trees, only instead of creating carbohydrate and oxygen from sunlight, they create electricity, transforming the sun's heat, meaning less heat to heat the environment.

.

The electricity will eventually be used to do something that returns the heat to the environment. Could be obvious, like running a heater, or indirect, like powering a vehicle whose motors produce some heat, tires produce some heat, and passage through the air warms the air slightly. In the end it all ends up as heat.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.