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Why not nuclear power?

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
And what percentage of spacecraft fail? NASA engineers hold their breath every time a spacecraft lifts off. Even when it make it off Earth problems/failures are common.
 

yossarian22

Resident Schizophrenic
And what percentage of spacecraft fail? NASA engineers hold their breath every time a spacecraft lifts off. Even when it make it off Earth problems/failures are common.
Ah, so 'holding their breath' shows a high failure rate? Please....
I would hold my breath too, if I was launching a couple million dollars of technology into the sky on a giant pillar of flame.
Catastrophic failure is extremely rare.
 

DarkSun

:eltiT
The problem is, spacecraft are notoriously unreliable. Spaceflight is a developing, largely experimental technology, and a sizeable load of high-level waste crashing to Earth could make Chernobyl look about as consequential as an infestation of crabgrass

Wow, I thought you'd all have missed my point.

Frubals! :D
 

DarkSun

:eltiT
Maybe in the days of Apollo 1. We launch stuff into space routinely.

The people we sent to the moon in the 60's actually came back. Since then, we still manage to find trouble getting people into space to begin with.

If you don't remember the incidents, just have a look at the past few mishaps we've had with spaceflight over the recent decade. You'll be surprised.

What if we replaced people with nuclear wastes?
 

yossarian22

Resident Schizophrenic
What if we replaced people with nuclear wastes?
totally different. Launching people is different from launching plain old mass. With people you have to worry about all sorts of things like life support, space, etc. With plain old junk, you are basically launching a box with as low a volume as possible.
It'd still cost a lot. And how much fuel would we all end up using to fling the wastes into space? Wouldn't that defeat the whole point of having a cleaner alternative?
Define clean. Emissions would go down. An old Russian Proton Rocket could launch a few tons of the stuff into space, but the cost per pound is somewhere around $300 or $400. But there is the problem of wasting resources. We aren't gonna get that rocket back. It'll probably fall into the ocean.
Rocketry has unfortunately gone stagnant, as rockets are basically cruise missiles which we point up. It may be possible to use a reusable high altitude aircraft and launch the stuff at a high enough velocity to break out of the earth's gravity. That would require hypersonic flight, which we are a long way from.
Than there is the space elevator idea, which we are a looooong way from.
 

DarkSun

:eltiT
In the US, powering one thousand peoples' homes for a year with nuclear power, produces thirty tonnes of radioactive watse. I've got a source for that listed a few pages back.

Considering the sheer amount of people in the US, it'd be reasonable to predict that launching a planet's worth of waste into space, would ultimately be harder than launching people up there.

Also, I wouldn't define clean as cost efficient. Although your interpretation of my words says a lot about your way of thinking, I never made reference to money. By clean, I mant fewer greenhouse gas emissions. We only have one planet. We have to be careful, even if the theory of man-made Global Warming may not be exactly precise.
 

9-10ths_Penguin

1/10 Subway Stalinist
Premium Member
I'd think it was too expensive. Wind power seems to be the most efficient in my boat...
Wind power's fine... until the wind stops blowing. You still need some sort of continuous base supply of power to keep the lights on and the computers working on windless, overcast days.

Certainly, shut off or turn down a few of those continuous power sources when you've got the wind power to cover it, but you still have to recognize that wind and solar are only intermittent power sources - they don't solve all our problems.
 

Rowenn

Member
Wind power's fine... until the wind stops blowing. You still need some sort of continuous base supply of power to keep the lights on and the computers working on windless, overcast days.

Certainly, shut off or turn down a few of those continuous power sources when you've got the wind power to cover it, but you still have to recognize that wind and solar are only intermittent power sources - they don't solve all our problems.

Actually, scientists have developed high-altitude "windmills" that float above and are tethered to the ground. At the height in the atmosphere they extend to, there is a always a constant source of "energy".
 

Colabomb

Member
Bad information primarily. Nuclear is honestly the best option for our future, if only people weren't obsessed with NIMBY
 

yossarian22

Resident Schizophrenic
In the US, powering one thousand peoples' homes for a year with nuclear power, produces thirty tonnes of radioactive watse. I've got a source for that listed a few pages back.
Considering the sheer amount of people in the US, it'd be reasonable to predict that launching a planet's worth of waste into space, would ultimately be harder than launching people up there.
True, at least at current estimates. It would be easy to store it however. Especially as 1000 tomes generate much more trash in a year than 30 tons
Also, I wouldn't define clean as cost efficient. Although your interpretation of my words says a lot about your way of thinking, I never made reference to money. By clean, I mant fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
I didn't define clean as cost efficient either. Reread my post. It would not be efficient in the slightest. It would reduce emissions, if that is all you care about. But there are other issues besides emissions to worry about. Namely all the nasty industrial byproducts which rocketry creates.
 

9-10ths_Penguin

1/10 Subway Stalinist
Premium Member
Actually, scientists have developed high-altitude "windmills" that float above and are tethered to the ground. At the height in the atmosphere they extend to, there is a always a constant source of "energy".
Sounds great if they can get it to work. I don't know much about this sort of thing, but from what I gather from a quick Google search, it seems these ideas are generally small-scale and in the very preliminary conceptual and testing stages (one site I found announced plans to test a 240 kW flying electric generator), and they don't work well in parts of the planet that don't have a jet stream.

It sounds like in their reasonably foreseeable forms, they might be useful for some niche applications, but I don't think they're really suited to large-scale base power generation.
 

DarkSun

:eltiT
True, at least at current estimates. It would be easy to store it however. Especially as 1000 tomes generate much more trash in a year than 30 tons

I didn't define clean as cost efficient either. Reread my post. It would not be efficient in the slightest. It would reduce emissions, if that is all you care about. But there are other issues besides emissions to worry about. Namely all the nasty industrial byproducts which rocketry creates.

Sorry, my bad. I misunderstood.

And yes, I agree that rocketry wouldn't be cost effiecient or ecological at the least.

But I disagree with storing the waste, too. The half-life of those substances as radioactive decay occurs is so beyond our comprehension it's not funny. I believe that the half-life of Uranium-238 is around 4.5 billion years, or something insane like that. Our sun is only going to last for another five billion years before it either explodes or becomes a black-hole, so in other words, we may be stuck with the trash for the rest of our exitsence.

Considering the drastic amount of changes that have occurred on our earth in the past 400, 000, 000 years alone, no one of our lifespan can possibly justify storing wastes like that in the environment. Any number of things could happen to the storage material that we keep the stuff in, and what was once a desert today may well be a lush rainforest in another hundred million years. The waste will still be around as our legacy; even if we're not there physically.

But if you want to worry about the present to the detriment of the future, then why not?

Oh wait... it costs a lot of money and man-hours to store these radioactive materials, the amount of water used in the cooling process is monstrous, the energy and fossil fuel consumption used in the storage and fabrication process is massive, and in general, it's pretty much just a waste of resource. While it's arguably better than fossil fuels at the moment, as the grade of Uranium ore decreases, that won't last.

It won't solve any of the world's issues. In fact, it'll slow the ones we have now down a bit and add to the threat of terrorism in various countries world wide.

It's not a solution.

Especially since greener alternatives could work just as well given that we manipulate their employment well enough.
 
Thankfully the fear mongers are putting their wallets ahead of their traditional activism. The majority of Americans, for the first time in resent years, are finally supportive of nuclear power, drilling wherever oil can be found, building new refineries, and so forth. Congress is going to have to act.
 

zenzero

Its only a Label
Friends,
Every action has a reaction and they will both be acting on both ends of the pole.
Take hydro power - We make big dams for that and these dams stop the flow of the rich alluvial soil required for farming [without using fertilisers] and also are a cause of floods downstrams.
Wind farms - good and green power but the blades are killing birds in the area.
Nuclear Popwer- could be we do not know how to dispose the waste properly but still is worth trying as fossil fuels are now getting over. MAy be a cheaper source of hydrogen for fuels?
Anycase the wheel will keep moving including me.
Love & rgds
 

Panda

42?
Premium Member
Friends,
Every action has a reaction and they will both be acting on both ends of the pole.
Take hydro power - We make big dams for that and these dams stop the flow of the rich alluvial soil required for farming [without using fertilisers] and also are a cause of floods downstrams.
Wind farms - good and green power but the blades are killing birds in the area.
Nuclear Popwer- could be we do not know how to dispose the waste properly but still is worth trying as fossil fuels are now getting over. MAy be a cheaper source of hydrogen for fuels?
Anycase the wheel will keep moving including me.
Love & rgds

Seriously wind turbines killing birds? For some reason I don't think that is a problems, birds are not that stupid. Also most farms don't use water from rives the water their crops, they use the main supply like everyone else.
 

wednesday

Jesus
Uranium cannot support the world for very long. Australia supplies something like 30% of the worlds uranium and at the current level of consumption reserves will dwindle in the next century. That is unless we find more deposits. With oil dwindling, consumption is set to increase as nuclear is the only viable alternative at the moment.

I believe tidal currents are the way forward, but sadly the only places where they would be profitable are generally uninhabited.
 
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