bunn | Nuclear power stations

Q: Why is it better to make radioactive waste than carbon dioxide?

A: Cui bono?

Or am I being cycnical?

What have suicide bombers got to do with it? As far as targeting power stations goes the IRA's mortars would be more effective, or rather less ineffective. The combination of massive security and large lumps of concrete over the sensitive bits makes bombing a pretty minor threat.

I think the thing about radioactive waste is that the volumes are pretty small and so are easier to look after. So long as you pay attention, at least. And the lesson of Chernobyl is to pay attention.

The bombers are an afterthought really (though I do wonder what would happen if someone flew a few planes into one).

'Pay attention' is not good enough for me. People are stupid, lazy and forgetful and I don't trust most of them to sell me a car, let alone run a thing that could go bang so spectacularly.

*Have* there been any changes to the technology that make it safer? It wasn't intended as a rhetorical question: I don't know the answer to it.

Totally unrelated to the issue, Purring of Kjetil is obviously a character in a fantasy or sf novel. Though it would probably be written P'rring of K'jetil. He's probably one of those comic relief secondary characters with delusions of grandeur. Or, if Kjetil takes offense at that, perhaps an all-powerful potentate who looks a little soft and silly but is secretly controlling the world.

You think Kjetil takes offence at anything? It seems unlikely!

He doesn't show it, no. But every single slight is being remembered, and will be repaid doubly when he finally comes into his own as ruler of the world.

I don't think that it's particularly a question of whether it's better to make radioactive waste rather than carbon dioxide. It's more to do with the fact we simply won't be able to meet the demands for power in the future unless we build more nuclear power stations. The North Sea oil fields are running out quicker than expected and we are very soon going to be relying on fuel piped from Europe or even further afield. Which is all very well, but it gives us less control over the supply and the price we'll pay for it.

The type of nuclear power station they would be building would be a new generation of reactor, I don't know the details, but I would presume they would be incorporating more safety features given the events of the last few years. They do produce far less waste and though it is high toxic it is possible to store it safely.

Personally I'd like to see the Government invest more in making it affordable for ordinary households to install solar panels and mini wind turbines, but that's unlikely to happen as no one profits from it directly, apart from the consumer, whose power bills go down, displeasing the power companies. I'd also like to see it mandatory for solar panels to be installed on all new builds, and companies also made to install them as well as making their buildings more energy efficient. Bacchus and I will be getting solar panels as soon we can afford them. Unfortunately that will probably not be for several more years.

Even if all that did happen though, the demand for power increases every year. Nuclear power may not be a popular option, but unless people start to use less electricity I don't really see any other choice.

I wondered about burning stuff - rubbish, particularly, as we have so much! - and I understood that there is now a move to make powerstations that are powered with a kind of mega-maize. That seemed nicely circular : carbon dioxide absorbed by maize-> powerstation-> carbon dioxide free -> maize again.

But I haven't heard anything at all about that since I stumbled over the report on some obscure radio station. It does sound cheaper and safer than nuclear though. All you seem to hear about is wind, which isn't reliable enough.

Our old family house in Shirwell had solar panels (well, it still does). They are pretty good for heating water, even in the winter - but we don't really get enough sun in the UK to generate electricity from it, I believe. I'm thinking we might get them here one day, though being on the north side of a hill, they might not work so well.

Also, I think they should rot dog-poo and make methane. Did you know all the dog poo is wrapped in plastic, then taken away from poo bins and burnt in incinerators? What a huge waste of energy for a completely biodegradable substance!

I agree bio-fuel should be exploited too and not just dog poo, cows famously produce lots of methane, I believe there is an island of monks that produce all their power needs from their cow shed. Then again I don't suppose their power needs are that great.

I've not heard of the maize fuel idea, I'd be interested to read more on that. My main worry would be what if the crop failed for some reason - what would they burn instead? It reminded me of the cars that can run on vegetable oil, apparently they smell like a chippy while they're running. I'd quite like one of them, but I think it might make me want to eat chips too often.

I have read about people who do manage to produce enough electricity from their solar panels that their meter runs backwards as they feed power back into the national grid. I think they had an awful lot of panels though.

Wow - maybe solar panels have got more effective. will have to look into it again. The ones we had would be about 20 years old now so it wouldn't surprise me.

In Holland, apparantly, they have a system for recycling disposable nappies to create energy/fertilizer/paper; I wish they'd introduce that here, since I have reluctantly abandoned the idea of washable nappies as impractical for me at this time, and am feeling bad about the land-fill volume.

.Why is it better to make radioactive waste than carbon dioxide?
Because, paradoxically, the carbon dioxide is a lot more likely to kill us all. At least that's what Lord May (outgoing prez of Royal Society) said when I heard him speak recently. He seemed convinced that global warming was a really serious threat to mankind, and that it was worth a few problems with radioactive waste to avert it.

Everyone agrees renewables would be great, but I assume they don't actually produce enough power. Otherwise we'd use them, right? I'm sure Tony Blair would much rather announce a new generation of maize-powered stations than nuclear ones.

I think we can more or less ignore Chernobyl. The Soviet system was so terrible and so utterly contemptuous of human life. Nothing like that has ever happened in the West -- OK there've been a few small leaks, but considerably less damage has been caused to human health by Western nuclear power than by, say, Western coal-mining -- not mention cars!

That's my take on it anyway..... - Neuromancer

I take your point - I'm a bit reluctant to trust that other routes have been properly explored though. Some of the ideas coming out recently seem to have been so ill thought out... I must do more reading up.

I meant to add that I deeply distrust the 'if that worked someone would already be doing it' thing.

Even in my line of work, I see plenty of examples of that argument being disproved - it seems that often what's really meant is 'it does work but the people who tried it last time were idiots/had a baby/ didn't have the funding/had horrible BO and no communication skills/were ahead of their time and there was no audience/ got discouraged and became accountants instead'.

Yes, but that doesn't really help.

There are masses of power sources, and all of them have problems. Either they don't produce much power, they do produce waste products, they're non-renewable, they might upset birds/whales/butterflies etc, or people don't want them next door.

Wind power was popular a few years ago, but it's being NIMBYed out of existence (some of my clients are in the field).

The demand at the moment is for something that will produce non-polluting power cheaply without requiring any visible structures.

The alternatives that fit that bill are:

a) off-shore tidal and wind farms (assuming the dolphins don't mind)
b) magicking the energy out of nowhere
c) nuclear

a) is immature technology - no-one knows how well it'll work as yet, and it won't at all for a good few years.
b) has no problems apart from being impossible
c) has a PR problem, but otherwise seems the least bad

I thought wind farms were too unreliable? It's hardly immature technology - there are wind farms round here that are many years old, and there was one in North Devon when I was at school - but my understanding was that you'd get brownouts in calms?

Your A B C analysis ties in with the last time that I did any serious reading on the subject, but that was (counts hastily on fingers and comes to truly horrifying conclusion) 17 years ago: surely things have moved on a bit?

They reckon that they're by no means as unreliable as people suggest. You don't get calms across the whole country at the same time very often, and when you do you kick in some other stations to pick up the slack. Some of the newer designs can keep generating at very low wind speeds.

Viz what Neuromancer said
"Everyone agrees renewables would be great, but I assume they don't actually produce enough power. Otherwise we'd use them, right?"

One of the problems we have now was caused by the Atomic Energy Commission and cronies in the Conservative government. Back in the 80s experimental work on renewables was shifted around so that it ended up being overseen, and underfunded by the AEC. If The work had been overseen by an independent set of bods we might now have a range of very efficient renewable energy generating stations. However, as

pellegrina almost says "Follow the money"

Well, I have no knowledge of how well or badly renewable technologies have been researched. But the principle of "follow the money" is a good one. Obviously any company that came up with a cheap, non-polluting way of making significant amounts of energy would make an absolute killing. So the fact that no one has yet done so suggests to me that it's not actually easy.

It reminds me, to touch on a controversial subject, of a most irritating guy I heard recently, arguing that animal research was actively hindering medical progress, and that if only those pesky scientists didn't insist on torturing bunny rabbits for fun, then we'd have had side-effect-free cures for AIDS/cancer/Alzheimer's/you name it, years ago. I said to him, "Surely in a global capitalist system, multinational pharmaceutical companies are driven primarily by the search for profit. [he nodded enthusiastically.] Clearly, any company that produced a side-effect-free cure for AIDS/cancer/Alzheimer's would rake in profit by the billions. Can you explain to me why the pharmaceutical companies are deliberately eschewing such profits in favour of conducting pointless experiments on animals?" I didn't get a coherent answer to that.

In general I don't believe in conspiracy theories. It may be that a brilliant non-polluting solution to all our energy needs is available, and just being suppressed by the ruthless vested interests of the oil companies and nuclear lobby -- I hope that IS the case! -- but on the whole it seems unlikely to me. :-(

On the other hand I do think less-polluting technologies will slowly get better and better, and hopefully we'll be able to abandon nuclear again one day.

Neuromancer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1659469,00.html
See this for a depressing article by George Monbiot on why biodiesel is even worse than oil. He doesn't say what he thinks of nuclear as an option. - Neuromancer

Nuclear power stations

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