Wind and Nuclear

Smaller wind turbine unit could be a practical option as well for a private house.

I think a lot of people think coal is "unpopular" becuase they have images of coal plants belching thick black smoke into the atmosphere, which is truly criminal to ever have to see. When you look at the industry, coal is the backbone and will be for quite some time. Coal can be clean, with carbon dioxide the only emission, depending on the setup.

Wind can be a good alternative for small projects, but I think it needs to be used in conjunction with other renewables like solar, hydro, etc. at the same time - they all don't always work, leaving you up the creek. There were some studies done mentioned in one of the other blogs about how the wind community failed to produce at capacity in California during a recent heat wave - it seems that the heat wave was caused by a great lack of wind, forcing reliance on good ole' coal and nuclear.

Wind is a good option, as we have some large wind farms not too far from here and they do pretty good, but we still have coal and nuclear for base load and peaking. I think more work needs to go into nuclear reactor design - there are other ways to do it besides PWR - it seems our entire nuclear industry is based on a few decisions early on that pushed out some other (good, safe) technologies as far as reactor design. These technologies are seeing a resurgence with China soon needing three times the current electricty production of the entire planet - renewables will help, but nuclear reactors are likely going to be doing the heavy lifting there. And billions of dollers per reactor plant isn't going to cut it.

My $0.02.

The only other practical option is nuclear power.

It all depends on how you define 'practical.' Conservation can be implemented far faster and more cheaply and cleanly than any alternative source of electricity, wind included.

It's true that nuclear reactors don't emit anything in operation (they had better not!), but the nuclear fuel cycle could not exist without consumption of massive amounts of fossil fuels in mining, construction, transport, enrichment, environmental remediation, etc. This reliance on hydrocarbons the nuclear industry's Achilles' heel and it is hard to see how it will outlast the era of cheap oil and natural gas as an economically-viable source of energy.

Another concern that receives little discussion is the growing outsourcing of nuclear fuel enrichment. According to the department of Energy the United States now imports roughly 65% of its enriched reactor fuel, roughly erqual to the percentage of imported crude oil. Since it is unlikely that the source countries have stricter air emissions laws than we do, so our nice clean nuclear electricity is probably already casting a fairly long and dirty shadow. The level or imports will increase in proportion to any surge in new reactor construction and leave us potentially vulnerable to future price manipulation or embargo by a nuclear OPEC. We could reprocess fuel, but that energy-intensive process carries its own boatload of environmental and security concerns.

We won't be relying on a nuclear OPEC, look up a French company called AREVA they do it from start to finish. They are not the only one that makes it either, there are some or at least one all-American company thats involved in it too. Nuclear is clean, its only a big steam engine. You won't have to vacuum up the steam from the smokestack just to bury it either, What a joke! bury the gas from the power plants, that sounds like a sham if I ever heard one, a big money laundering effort by some company working on the fears of others, Bury it? One good Earthquake and the EARTH is going to burp it back out, who came up with that idea? That cloud from the stack is only steam there aren't any pollutants in it. The spent fuel cannot be re-used, not even for a terrorist's plot because it is mixed with molten glass and buried in 4foot thick lead walls, you cannot bring it back once it's mixed with the glass and if a terrorist just so happened to go several hundred feet under American soil to get to it, if they ever got through the 4'thick vault...the radiation would kill them instantly. Nuclear power technology has developed fuel that disperses heat so well that even if everything goes wrong, it will not overheat and meltdown. There are so many countries working together on nuclear that you wouldn't believe it and if there is a nuclear OPEC, the US is going to be on the distributing end of it. We can spin down an old cold-war missile attachment and make fuel for 20 plants. That 65% is probably coming from France. I am not knocking non-nuclear ways of producing electricity but the public has a bad opinion of Nuclear power because of what happened at 3-mile island and from what I stated above, there will not be another meltdown. The most impressive energy harnessing of nature is the Three gorges dam project in China, it has about 12 (460ton) generators built into it. More power than several Nuclear plants. They've done a great job with that Project. I wonder who's idea it was originally, I bet they have a big head.

There is nothing clean about Nuclear power it is just the uninformed that assume this. As someone has already pointed out that Nuclear fuel is produced in some pretty shady countries and then must be transported to the reactor. Then when our limited technology has extracted a small proportion of the potential energy of the fuel we must transport the waste to a site where we hope it will stay buried for 10,000yrs min. I know of three site in the last 15 years that have closed due to leaks.

The truth is we no very little about what environmental horrors we are creating for our children and we seem to ignore the risk of transporting radioactive fuels around a planet in such political turmoil. it would only take one terrorist to sink one ship transporting nuclear fuel or waste and our oceans and the food resources we depend on would be compromised then the particles would evaporate with the water and then we would have moved up from acid rain to Nuclear rain. before anyone builds another nuclear power station they should talk to the children of Chernobyl. There possibly is a future for Nuclear energy but not as we know it, our best hope at this time is the Fusion plant under construction in France from this we hope to get a better understanding and develop methods of extracting higher levels of energy from non volatile materials.

SLIVER BULLET

Stop looking for the silver bullet, it doesn't exist! i look forward to a future that encompass wind, solar, Hydro, Thermo, and very little fossil energy programs. But to start with we need to be more conservative, use less energy consumed and we will have less demand... efficeancy. from there, as one reader pointed out Micro, each house has a deep cycle batt system that is recharged from the Wind turbine and solar bank on the roof. (the sorter the distance the electricity is transported to each house the less energy wasted in the transport process) this would reduce the demand over all and with this reduction Hydro and Thermo could provide the balance required and during those peaks the old fossil fuels could pick up the balance when required.

Times have changed people it is no longer your country but..."ask not what your planet can do for you but what you can do for your planet!" or we are going to be bloody cold on mars!

It would be nice if we could send the spent fuel into space and shoot it at the sun, the sun would just eat it

As a Canadian citizen and a citizen of the country that is probably the largest single producer of Uranium in the world, I resent the referral to the "pretty shady countries" that produce Uranium. I am sure that the Austrailians would feel the same.

The fuel assemblies for a nuclear reactor are not radioactive untill they have been irradiated in a reactor. I have seen pictures of a CANDU fuel bundle being held by a person wearing only gloves, presumably to protect the fuel bundle from skin oils.

If you know of sites where there have been leakage problems then name them. A post that is filled with unsubstaniated claims or claims that can't be substantiated is assumed to come from someone who can't prove what he or she is saying and just wants to make anti-nuclear comments.

Dear

The problems related to nuclear power are not yet resolved- especially related to reprocessing , waste disposal and other related to spread of technologies!

The fact is that this is not a conception even in US where few new nuclear plants are being set up as of now.As far as Europe is concerned many countries have given up setting new plants for a long time.

In India there is a lobby which wants to build such plants for energy security because there are not many fuel resources related to oil.

Nuclear power will not see much advance unless all the related saftey issues are resolved - I think thorium route - and fast breeder is the one which will prevail in the end.Wind power is no substitute for Bulk power projects and it can not be used on large scale to supply energy to metropolis.

Therefore gas based and Coal based power will remain the favourite for next fifty years or so,There is a ashift to clean coal technology and it will,stay that way.

Alok MIsra

Reprocessing fuel is the trick. You can continue to use it until a good majority of the fuel is gone. Not all gone, but most. Reliable long term storage is still an issue. With half-lifes longer than any of us, future considerations are placeed well in to the future.

This is Nuclear biggest drawback.

The other option is Breeder reactors. These reactors produce more fuel than they start with, thus suppling more fuel and less outages.

Nuclear's future is also tied to the "Hydrorgen Economy", as a way to procure Hydrogen while not wasting fuel. Consider it CoGen.

Some quality thinking now, with informed, civilized debate, will go along way to providing the energy we need, and not destroy the world for the future.