Nuclear power.

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I've always been a huge fan of solar power. Clean, free, endless supply from source (well, when it does run out there will be nobody left to care) Solar arrays are popping up more and more these days and it's not only legal but encouraged to get your own to help power your home, with a big enough estate and with the right conditions (I.E. You live in some hot as shit dust bowl like Saudi Arabia or Arizona) you can not only power your property but also feed back into the grid. As previously stated in the thread the only major problem would be the supply of rare earth materials required in construction, but it's completely possible to build your own cell arrays... so long as you have a basic understanding of physics and engineering and you have the planning permission.

When I was younger I was able to strip down a $2.36 solar power cell phone charger unit and use it to power a fan in my room. as soon as those blades started turning I was like "Shit... this is the future".
 
A lot of people who oppose nuclear power usually don't know much about the science of radiation or the chemical properties of the materials. People think we're gonna get another disaster like Chernobyl or that plants will go off like nuclear bombs in those old time "Duck and Cover" films. The Fukushima disaster back in 2011 had some people in a panic because of the western coast of the US getting irradiated by the leaked materials from the plant (even though everything is still alive and kicking the same as it ever was). Famous Youtuber Thunderf00t recently did a nice series dispelling and debunking a lot of the "panic" surrounding nuclear power and materials, and the supposed effects from the Fukushima disaster.
 
UnwiseKhan dijo:
The safety measures in particular are something I want to call attention to. The reactors that melted down in Fukushima were nearly 50 years old and woefully outdated designs. This is true in the united states as well, a huge percentage of the reactors used in power plants are based very old designs, and due to anti-nuclear sentiment and lack of funding, very little work is being done to upgrade or improve them, just to maintain what is already there. It's like claiming that cars are dangerous and then refusing to fund research into seatbelts.
Presiona para expandir...

An important thing to note is that the damage to health and the environment caused by the Fukushima accident also wasn't really that bad for an industrial accident, despite the alarmist harpings about a giant cloud of ball-melting radiation floating across the Pacific. Even an outdated reactor lacking severely in modern safety methods still didn't have the kind of accident that stupid people predict will occur with nuclear power.

I'm 100% in support of nuclear energy. It's superior in power-to-cost ratio and relatively low pollution compared to just about every other method out there. Nuclear waste isn't that big of a deal as long as you follow proper procedures and dispose of it safely (which means harshly punishing violations of the procedure or unscrupulous companies trying to dump it in dangerous areas to save on money).

Fact is, solar and wind power are clean and pretty but aren't efficient enough to provide us with what we need in the modern developed world. Not to mention that both methods are reliant on environmental conditions remaining ideal; a windmill makes no power when there's no wind, and a solar panel provides no energy at night and loses efficiency on a cloudy day. A nuclear reactor will keep working unless the laws of physics change.

Ironically, this very problem with wind and solar energy is exactly what keeps polluting plants like coal and oil still in heavy operation: nuclear alarmists block every attempt at developing nuclear power, but wind and solar power can't sustain everything, so we keep using stuff that puts out large amounts of pollution and relies on fossil fuels to keep going. Just about all of the paranoia about nuclear energy comes from people who don't understand what they're talking about.
 
I'll support just about anything that isn't coal or oil. Nuclear all the way, mixed with hydro and solar where possible.
 
Nuclear power is the way to go. It has a proven track record of meticulous safety. Of course, because when it rains it pours, the media has seized upon two of the worst disasters to create an image of nuclear power as unspeakably dangerous when really this is not the case at all. In addition, there are "meltdown-proof" Generation IV designs in the pipeline.

There are numerous unsolved problems, such as nuclear waste management and ensuring its safe storage for tens of thousands of years (perhaps long enough for eroding culture and education to make us forget what radioactivity even is). The solution is to fix these problems, not to declare them unfixable.

I only take one huge issue with it, and that's the expense. I pay $0.14/kWh in a nuclear town, and combined with a shitty heat pump, this routinely results in $500-900 electric bills (as well as the police thinking you're growing weed.)
 
I pay 60-70 bucks (Los Angeles) for my electric bill and I have greenhouse in the back that has it's heavy industrial lights on all night.

What the fuck kind of heater do you have!?
 
Pikimon dijo:
I pay 60-70 bucks (Los Angeles) for my electric bill and I have greenhouse in the back that has it's heavy industrial lights on all night.

What the fuck kind of heater do you have!?
Presiona para expandir...

A greenhouse with heavy industrial lights you say Pikimon ?
I wonder what you grow there . ;)
 
The main concern I'd have with nuclear (fission) power is where to store the waste, and possible effects on the environment . Unless we develop the technology to dump it in the sun, that is. Nuclear power plants today are much safer and better managed than Chernobyl, from what I understand.

Fusion power, on the other hand, is a far better. The only "waste" is helium (assuming it's hydrogen fusion your working with), which, as it's been said somewhere, could be very useful for a new generation of airships and balloons. The only problem is that with current technology, it takes more energy to initiate a reaction than you get out of it.

Then there's power from antimatter/matter reactions. They produce a lot more energy than fusion per volume of fuel. However, antimatter power is far less feasible nowadays due to the immense difficulty in producing antimatter with current technology, not to mention that if containment fails, it'd be very, very bad. Still, there's nothing left but gamma radiation (which could be easily managed, I think) after a reaction occurs.
 
Última edición:
Honestly, I'm supportive of Nuclear power. It's pretty clean, what waste it does produce is contained with relative ease, and the fact that it's so scary to a lot of people means that there are a ton of safeguards for it. Now if only we'd update our nuclear plants more often, since last I checked we had a moratorium on building them, even though later generations have more safeguards. I will note I'm supportive of all forms of clean energy as well.
 
It's an oversimplification, but I think not using nuclear power due to the larger dangers of when it goes wrong in comparison to coal/oil is like not using aircraft over cars/boats for the same reason.

Of course, a large part of the problem is the greedy, short sighted attitudes of those who benefit from the current state of affairs. But then it's not just nuclear losing out.
I was shocked to read a few weeks ago that it's illegal in some places in the US to install solar panels, and I believe that's true in Spain as well.
The idea of it being illegal to take advantage of free energy shining down on your roof is bonkers to me.
 
That's corporate interest for you. My power company has still not bothered to hook up our panels, in spite of us calling them every day. For six months. After a person we recommended already had theirs go online.
 
Waste is a stone sumbitch of a problem.

Hydro is great, as long as you don't live in Indiana or one of them flat places without any elevation anywhere. I love to crack on people from "mountain" states like North Carolina ("Nice hills, but where do you put the other ten thousand feet?") being a Utah boy myself ("never trust anyone under seven thousand feet") but the flooding behind a hydroelectric reservoir is an environmental concern easily equaling nuclear waste.

The most polluted places on our dear planet are Hanford, Washington, and Chelyabinsk, Ukraine. There are places near Kyshtym (Ukraine) where standing by the riverbank for 45 minutes will get you a lethal gamma-ray dose.

Follow me here: the electromagnetic spectrum starts in low, low frequency radio waves, proceeds into microwaves, radio freqs, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays, and finally gamma rays where the whole thing stops because them quantum gods ain't having none of it. Photons have no mass, but they do have angular momentum. Since no mass = they can only move at the speed of light en vacuo, their momentum is measured by "spin", or "color." They all move at the same speed, but some hit harder than others. There was an event measured here in good ol' Utah by the "Fly's Eye" where some subatomic particle entered the atmosphere with the angular momentum of a well-thrown baseball. That thing was spinning motherfucking hard.

Modern reactor designs are as safe as they can be, given our current technology. Fukushima was due for shutdown, and Chernobyl was an outdated fast-breeder (ie: plutonium factory for making bombs) run by idiots. It can be (and is) done better. Naval reactors, as used in U.S. subs and aircraft carriers, use fuel that is better than bomb-grade.

Uranium is an alpha-emitter, i.e. particles that can travel less than an inch in air. However, throw an alpha into something like beryllium, and you get a neutron. U-238 + N = U-239, with a half life of five minutes or so until it emits a beta particle (electron) and magically turns into N-239 ('cause a neutron has lost it's electron bit and turned into a proton, thereby changing into the next atomic element in the table) with a half-life of five and a half days or thereabouts (see above re: one more proton) and it turns into Pu-239, the absolute Hannibal Lecter of the periodic table, the deadliest substance there is. Seaborg named it Pu as a joke, but the Euro-geeks didn't get it and approved the name. Uranium, Neptunium, -- Plutonium. That is the shit that's in those "spent" fuel rods. Six and one-half kilograms (a sphere about the size of a golf ball) cannot exist in the same place at the same time in this universe.

The alternative is flooding your canyons. See: Lake Powell. There are no easy solutions. Solar is groovy, except for this "night" thing we have going on and it isn't efficient above about 38 degrees north latitude. Wind is fine, if you don't like birds or bats and if it's windy enough. Tides are great if you have a handy ocean and live near the Bay of Fundy or some such. The alternative is nuclear, and that's where I stand, and that's where we should go, at least for the moment.

Herein I was going to attempt to post a pic of Casey Serin failing to clean his swimming pool displayed on my Logi G19 keyboard with a blacklight pen-light-thing illuminating a radioactive marble (of which I have a buttload) but you will have to settle for the following signed and dedicated print of an Achewood strip, so deal.

achewood1_small.jpg~original
 
It also should be noted that a coal-fired power plant releases more radiation every day than a nuclear plant does in its entire lifetime. Troof. Nuclear plants that aren't Chernobyl or Fukushima, that is. As far as other meltdowns go, Three Mile Island released less than a typical Tuesday at a coal plant, and Windscale was fully contained.

The Canadian pebble-bed CANDU design is really interesting, can't melt down, can't explode, and may lend itself to thorium fuel that doesn't leave that nasty waste anyway. The Canucks surprisingly own some rich thorium deposits and may just end up being the next Saudi Arabia as far as energy suppliers go. We shall see, eh?

Boring shit follows, feel free to skip if not interested in this stuff:

Re: coal plants. There's a goodly amount of polonium-210 in coal smoke. That's an alpha emitter, and dust particles with a molecule or three in them are thereby positively charged. Got an old CRT-style television set or monitor? The electron gun bit in the picture tube (i.e. the particle accelerator) puts a net negative charge on the glass, and polonium is precisely why dust sticks to the screen. It's radioactive as shit, any decent Geiger counter can measure it. Turn the tv off and you can plot the polonium's half-life pretty easily with a few measurements over an hour or so.

Re: CANDU, Chernobyl, and void coefficients: CANDU and the fast-breeder Soviet RBMK design used at good ol' Chernobyl #4 (and in something like seventy other reactors sprinkled aroud the former Soviet and Soviet-puppet zones) moderate them neutrons with graphite *and* the (high-pressure water) coolant. Problem is, if you let the thing get too hot, steam bubbles form and moderation doesn't go so well anymore. The neutron flux goes up and so does your reaction. This creates sort of a vicious-cycle thing as you get more steam bubbles, you make more steam bubbles, and things go faster and faster until it all gives up and the steam blows the 2-million pound steel lid off the top of your reactor. That's a bit of an oversimplification -- the control rods were a bad design, and xenon was forming in the core, plus a bunch of other stuff, but that's the basic idea. CANDU has a negative void coefficient also but is designed so it can't do anything of the sort. All Western reactors have positive void coefficients, so if steam bubbles form the reaction slows down and stops.

Re: Homemade bombs: If you have about 135 lbs. of uranium enriched to above 70% U-235 and a machine shop that doesn't object to making it into a hollow cylinder and a plug to fit in the middle of same, you can just drop the cylinder nine feet and it'll be moving fast enough to go supercritical. Little Boy, in your basement. I would not be near the basement at the time.

Re: Homemade bombs Part 2: at one time, not so long ago, there were a few hundred ex-Soviet nuclear subs rusting away in drydock, unguarded. Naval reactor fuel is better than bomb-grade.

Re: My Dinner with Robert Oppenheimer: I don't remember it, because I was around two years old, but he came by the house once for a Mom-cooked dinner. I didn't find out about this until somewhat later, like 40 years later. (I'd hafta check the dates - I'm currently 35 or thereabouts (I think) so the math doesn't work quite right, but it was something like that.)
 
Pikimon dijo:
I pay 60-70 bucks (Los Angeles) for my electric bill and I have greenhouse in the back that has it's heavy industrial lights on all night.

What the fuck kind of heater do you have!?
Presiona para expandir...

I would like to know more. Electricity is around 28c/kWh where I live. LA should be close to that. Our apartment is only 60m2 and our utility bill is around 100USD per month with us conserving electricity(lights off, no AC, timer on everything) and water.
 
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