those fuckin realos.
where are the fundis today?
The position above is identical to that of GHW Bush in 1988. I don't agree. Photovoltaic power is now a practical alternative -esp when the top-secret multi-layered technology now being held captive at Stanford University is released. Essentially, photocells only utilize a narrow spectrum of light: multiple layers of semi-transparent material would -
each sensitive to a different color - yield many times the output current of the most sophisticated cells now available - which are good enough to liberate many homes in Northern CA from the traditional power grid. btw, arnold has broken with GW Bush on the issue of global warming see:
http://electromagnet.us/dogspot/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=393
so, the news about a possible alliance between the greens and conservatives in Germany -
where the Green party was founded -
can be clearly understood.
But the fundis are the the ones who are fundamentally opposed to capitalism and the screwjob of neo-liberal trade policies -
policies that might well undermine themselves.

Realo!

Simple question: What do we do with the waste?

FYI: Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog mentioned in the linked Post article above, has also endorsed a novel of nuclear power by a longtime industry insider (me). This is a good lay person's guide to the good and the bad of this power source. (There's plenty of both). The book is available at no cost to readers at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com - and they seem to like it, judging from their homepage comments.

While I agree that nuclear waste is a big issue, I think it's important to put it in perspective. With transportation and underground storage, there are potential extremely serious risks of spills and contamination. With coal plants there is continuous pollution of the atmosphere, not to mention what extracting the coal does to the environment. Kind of like hoping not to get shot before you finish dying from a thousand paper cuts.

Personally I'd much rather see lots of wind farms, and solar panels on every roof than more nuclear plants, but until those technologies are able to fully support our energy needs, I'd rather see more nuclear than more coal. And when I say able to support our energy needs, I mean also in a cost and infrastructure sense, I realize they are technically capable of doing so today.

Where's Radwaste this morning?

Here's a factor that makes it still an issue for me:

If I live near a coal plant, someone there screws up, and there's a fire, only the coal plant gets damaged.

If I live near a nuke plant and the same thing happens, I'm fucked.

If you live near a coal plant you are getting fucked -- just slowly.

But with coal, the fuckedness of the landscape doesn't last for 250,000 years. Even if all God's Creatures in the vicinity are fucked, they're back on the air after a century or so.

Good gravy...

realo, solar is great, but no matter what, you're not getting more watts than shines on the screen. Efficiency is the god of solar device guys now because of this limitation.

I have to point out a couple of things. First, whether you personally want it or not, you're gettng nuclear now, because people must have their air conditioning and heating. That's the end of that story; insulation can only do so much, and millions of people still buy crap for houses because that's what they can afford in the short run. Yes, there are well-designed houses. No, they aren't affordable and they won't be; like computer technology, improvements follow demand, they don't lead it.

About power plant reliability: for the last 50 years, you've had 200 more reactors close by than you realized because of the controls on the Navy's nuclear program. It is possible to run such plants without poisoning you today; ADM Rickover even drank primary reactor water in front of Congress to show how tight his control were.

Now for the waste. Chernobyl should show you what happens when controls are lost - when controlling every part of the process becomes secondary to some other perceived "need". The Russians thought they had to run a test or be penalized on their next job application. I kinda wish they'd gone for that.

The bulk of the materials lost is what makes Chernobyl such a disaster. You'll notice that Nagasaki, Hiroshima and

...and Harrisburg, PA are all populated. The US has detonated hundreds of atom bombs, and it's tough to tell. Take a look at http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/ for a look. Find "Castle Bravo" if you need a little jolt.

The biosphere has a limitation on how much living mass it can support. Our poisoning ourselves is one of these limits, and of course we are not exempt from any of the laws of nature we pretend are for others.

Studying the issue is all I can really recommend, because otherwise I'd endlessly repeat myself about how most energy advances are just delaying mechanisms, putting off the day we can't find anything else to burn. So - hope for a fusion plant soon, but recognize that nearly 60% of the best steam plant's energy is wasted as heat at the generator - and then ALL of is wasted propelling a wide butt to Wal-Mart because it's bored with the couch.

So your answer to Patrick's question is that we shouldn't worry as long as an educated and responsibly democratic capitalism is running the shop?

Good so far as it goes, but it makes me fear for Amy's nuclear-powered but immigrant-swammped France.

PS- It's always the books and articles you don't save that haunt the memory. About 8 years ago there was a web page that showed soem interesting designs for waste storage facilities. The idea was that we'd want to put this shit into vaults that would last longer than the human race and into the era of the next intelligent species... So their architecture had to be scary enough to ward off the curious without benefit of language. The drawings themselves looked like a mix of German Expressionism and what lonely 12-year-old boys sketch onto their lined paper during health class. The point is, we're not really good about thinking of things in the longest term.

The "photovoltaic is better than nuclear" argument is just plain wrong. I realize it is an argument made by the environmentally-concerned equivalent of religious fanatics, but it is also hugely and demonstrably outlandish.

Photovoltaic electrical power generation is not increased by filtering for multiple wavelengths so as to "yield many times the output current of the most sophisticated cells now available". If you look back to your solid state and semiconductor physics you'll remember that holes (electrons) in the n dopant are kicked loose by photons and attracted towards the p dopant causing current. But the energy required to kick loose the electron(s) is a quantum or multiple thereof.

Photons in the lower wavelengths simply don't have the photoelectric quantum energy (the photoelectric effect is what Einstein got his Nobel prize for), and most wavelengths in the upper bands are not the right frequency. The action requires a specific frequency or multiple thereof. Anything else doesn't qualify. So you can DQ anything below (about) yellow - which means yellow, orange, red and lower (near-IR and IR).

Wavelengths in the green, blue, violet and soft UV are next, and they do the job of sufficiently energizing electrons to allow them to migrate from n to p. Wavelengths shorter and harder than that, the mid- to hard- UV, are blocked by atmospheric absorption so don't even reach the cells. Thus your input is limited to the range of green to soft UV in the mid-500 nanometers to just shorter than 400 nm.

But keep in mind that the wavelengths have to be a multiple of the quantum required. Not just any old photon will do, there has to be a je ne sais quoi between the photon (doing the courting) and the electron (being receptive). If the photon doesn't have the juice then the electron isn't gonna dance.*

Solar photovoltaic cannot and never will approach the power densities that nuclear can produce. In fact it will never even get close. SPV produces a few electron-volts (eV) per event, or a few volts per unit, and nuclear produces a few MeV per event, with a much higher event density, and a few megawatts per plant. It's like the difference between propeller vs jet planes, only 100,000x moreso.

Incidentally the best efficiencies achieved by the most exotic solar photovoltaic semiconductors are less than 20%, and the affordable substrates are only about 10% efficient. It would require tens (if not hundreds) of square miles of PV to produce the electrical power that comes out of a nuc reactor. That land then becomes essentially useless for anything else. And the production required to make the cells would be staggering (include the dopants, steel, etc.)

Yes, more energy density can be produced by solar concentrated into thermal driving steam turbines, but these are still only millionths of the capability of nuclear. And neither photovoltaic nor thermal are worth much in the high northern or southern latitudes.

Nuclear waste is a real problem, but it can be dealt with by using well engineered solutions, e.g. Yucca Mountain. (Storing rods in onsite ponds is not a safe or long term solution, btw.)

Nuclear power can be engineered well to be reliable and safe. Many countries do it, and most do it well. Burning petroleum to push millions of people back and forth in single-user vehicles with hundreds of horsepower per person is so ridiculous that words cannot describe. That petroleum they throw away into the atmosphere is too valuable as raw material for production of plastics, or as fuel for vehicles that truly need portable fuel (ships, planes and trucks).

Increasing energy efficiency - especially in building materials and buildings - is a valuable and necessary step, but only part of the solution in that they reduce the demand for new energy manufacturing plants. Bringing new energy plants to society is just as necessary as population grows and energy needs expand.

The reality is that the world has large energy needs in both existing societies (Western world) and emerging markets (China, India). Burning petroleum will heavily increase atmospheric CO2 (and CO and methane) loading and will accelerate global climate change in a manner that is orders of magnitude more damaging and dangerous to the planet (both civilization and nature) than the problem of nuclear waste disposal.

To close, I am deeply aware that the battle lines of this argument are drawn, and that most people on the "green" side are comparable to religious zealots in their commitment to solar and against nuclear. It is unfortunate that they cannot be realistic about both the challenges and the solutions. As we see, there are some (Patrick Moore, Stewart Brand, James Lovelock) who can see the alternatives and make a decision based on realistic alternatives, but there is simply no arguing with those for whom sheer belief is the only illuminating factor.

(Amy - apologies for the length of the rant.)

*Did the mating ritual metaphor bring the story back to Advice Goddess territory? ;-)

My understanding of the long term storage of nuclear waste is that it decays extremely slowly hence it gives off only a little tiny bit of radiation. You can hold it in your hand and it won't hurt you. The sun does more damage to you. The radiation that is dangerous/lethal decays quickly giving off large amounts of radiation hence it is gone quickly too.

You can hold it in your hand and it won't hurt you.

Care to give us a demonstration?

Yes, it decays extremely slowly. And until it decays, it's toxic. Holding plutonium or uranium 235 in your hands is far from advisable.

chicknlady is pretty much right. Not only is solar UV more dangerous, but toxic organics are far more dangerous than either. The biggest threat to the planet now is through global climate change due to organics. (And pollution by organics.)

Actually, holding Pu or U would not be much of a problem, assuming a small quantity. Put a small amount in a piece of paper in your hand and you won't get contaminated. The radiation would not be much of a factor either. It's only toxic if it gets into you, either via inhalation or some other mechanical introduction. (The paper is to prevent oxidation and dissolving a small amount into the skin.) You could look it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium Spent U is not much of a problem either.

Note that much of my description above is very simplified. You'll need to do your own study of scientific sources to get the full picture. The wikipedia article is a good place to start.

The problems with nuc waste are really more due to the fission products and their radioactivity. They can be contained and controlled though, with well designed and implemented procedures.

> The biggest threat to the
> planet now is through global
> climate change due to organics.

This certitude is dumbfounding. How could you know? How could you know? How could you know? What if there were a comet? (Would you change your mind if you saw it coming through the clouds? Anybody remember nuclear winter?)

And by what measures? And for which species? (I'm a team player: Decent people consider their impact, but when push comes to shove, I want want's best for people.)

This is not balanced thinking, and it won't lead to sane policy. To regard so very many questions as answered or even answerable --let alone answered in that way-- is every bit as arrogant as the religious fanaticism that vexes Amy. I think it springs from the same impulse, and it ain't humility.

sorry for getting into this one late but....

if those greenpeace idiots hadn't strawmanned their way to handicapping the nuclear industry, we'd have lightwater reactors right now that produce a fraction of the radioactive byproduct than current plants do, but because of the legislation in place no energy company is willing to invest the time or capital to build a new plant. if i remember correctly, the last nuke plant built was in the 70s. needless to say, our technology has gotten a bit better since then.

i'd say the odds would be even that we would be on the verge of developing commercial nuclear fusion (NO nuclear waste) if the nuclear industry wasn't throttled.

but, as always, the people and the politicians, especially the politicians, were shortsighted, and we promoted coal and oil in lieu of nuclear to save our environment. that was smart.

sorry for getting into this one late but....

if those greenpeace idiots hadn't strawmanned their way to handicapping the nuclear industry, we'd have lightwater reactors right now that produce a fraction of the radioactive byproduct than current plants do, but because of the legislation in place no energy company is willing to invest the time or capital to build a new plant. if i remember correctly, the last nuke plant built was in the 70s. needless to say, our technology has gotten a bit better since then.

i'd say the odds would be even that we would be on the verge of developing commercial nuclear fusion (NO nuclear waste) if the nuclear industry wasn't throttled.

but, as always, the people and the politicians, especially the politicians, were shortsighted, and we promoted coal and oil in lieu of nuclear to save our environment. that was smart.

yeah right. After my reactor threw a (cadmium) rod I got myself a really smokin' solar rig at KMart and now I'm off the grid. have another beer.
OK, don't mind if I do

I can't resist quoting one of your techno trolls -
"Solar photovoltaic cannot and never will approach the power densities that nuclear can produce."
Thank god, now I feel safe.
"In fact it will never even get close."
whew! not even close to hurting my canary!

"Incidentally the best efficiencies achieved by the most exotic solar photovoltaic semiconductors are less than 20%.."
classy statement. But what is 20% of FREE.
20% of zero cost? no waste?
you can't just flush that shit down yr toilet, dude...

Realo!

Anyone know about biofuels? What about genetically engineered biofuels? Designed not to reproduce at all, but to put all their efforts into capturing solar energy and converting it into chemical potential energy for us to harvest. A complete unknown - but no more unknown than how we can give nuclear waste to our children. (Gee, thanks, pa!)

Once I dated a guy who claimed to be a nuclear engineer. I was asking him lots of questions about nuclear energy and how it is produced and he messed up and said fusion. I said, "Don't you mean fission?" He stumbled along until I said, "Gee I wonder how many girls you've dated know the difference between fusion and fission?" The truth turned out to be he built scafolding for the local nuke plant. Haha busted.