I'm still trying to figure out what is so bad about Carbon Dioxide... is that not what plants breath? Why are we trying to suffocate the trees?[/QUOTE]Well, it might work to send the nuclear waste into space, but it would be pretty expensive, and what if the rocket crashed?

About the CO2, I've been consistently stating that it is not a pollutant and necessary for plant life (and by extension, animal/human life--we all eat plants). The mania to reduce CO2 is misguided.

flashguy[/QUOTE]

I learned that in grade school. Part of the photosynthesis process.
The libs are trying to swap it out for carbon monoxide. I guess anything with 'carbon" is evil and deadly.

I think instead of asking whether a power system is "green," the better question is how efficient is it.

If you get the ideal energy source, you would get 100% input/output ratio which means zero waste. While wind is free, the process to convert that isn't and is wasteful when you consider the energy used to produce and replace the vanes and to process the used vanes. I think hydroelectric plants are pretty efficient.

I am somewhat biased for nuclear power as I was a nuclear plant operator.

I think the holy grail is fusion power.

A huge problem with wind power (current) are those huge wind turbines are not recyclable and end in landfills.

+they really do kill a lot of birds

If you buy into “green “, then you believe in anthropogenic global climate change.

Greta Thunberg is holding for you on line two.

The sun, Sol is laughing out loud!

Yes, nuclear power is green.

The waste is a relatively small amount (when compared to the products of combustion), and we can store it quite safely.

We are fools not to use more nuclear.

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:

quote:

Originally posted by Blume9mm:
I just had an idea... why not pay Elon to shoot the waste into space past our gravitational field and then the sun would just suck it in eventually and recycle it?

I'm still trying to figure out what is so bad about Carbon Dioxide... is that not what plants breath? Why are we trying to suffocate the trees?

Well, it might work to send the nuclear waste into space, but it would be pretty expensive, and what if the rocket crashed?

About the CO2, I've been consistently stating that it is not a pollutant and necessary for plant life (and by extension, animal/human life--we all eat plants). The mania to reduce CO2 is misguided.

flashguy

Besides the "what if the rocket blows up" question, getting into space is not the same as getting it into the sun.

Basically, what we want to consider is the cost, per kWh of electricity produced, to dispose of the really nasty radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactors.

I did some back-of-the-envelope estimates and came up with the following:

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy currently has the lowest cost-to-orbit per kilogram of payload.

A Falcon Heavy could get radioactive waste into Earth orbit for about a half cent per kWh, or get the waste out of Earth's orbit for about two cents per kWh.

So far, so good.

However, if you get the waste out of Earth's orbit, it isn't going to just fall into the sun. It will keep orbiting the sun on a similar orbit to Earth's orbit around the sun. If you want to make the waste fall into the sun, you have to "stop" it in its orbit (remove all its orbital velocity).

Now it gets expensive.

You'd need to do about 10,000 Falcon Heavy launches to get enough fuel out of Earth's orbit to do 100 Falcon Heavy missions to slow down enough fuel to half of Earth's orbital velocity to do 1 Falcon Heavy mission to get from half of Earth's orbital velocity to "stopped" so that the waste would fall into the sun.

Ignoring any costs or problems with scaling to that many rocket launches (that is about twice the total number of orbital launches in the history of spaceflight), that would get you to about $200 per kWh to drop the waste into the sun. If you haven't looked at an electric bill lately, residential electric rates are usually about 10-20 cents per kWh.

The 10,000 launches would get about 15 metric tons of radioactive waste into the sun and cost about 1.5 trillion dollars.

France has efficient nuclear plants and does spent fuel reprocessing to reclaim about 96% of the spent fuel so that only 4% of the spent fuel ends up as nuclear waste.

If we assume all the nuclear power generation in the world follows France's model, we end up with about 300 metric tons of nuclear waste per year, so we have to do the 10,000 launch thing 20 times per year - 200,000 launches per year (one every 2.5 minutes) at an annual cost of 30 trillion dollars (more than 1/3 of the entire GPD of Earth).

It wouldn't necessarily actually be quite that bad, because there are orbital mechanics tricks you can do to make things significantly more efficient, and a purpose-designed spacecraft would be more efficient, but "drop it into the sun" is not going to be a viable solution to nuclear waste disposal with anything remotely resembling current technology.

quote:

Originally posted by Blume9mm:
I just had an idea... why not pay Elon to shoot the waste into space past our gravitational field and then the sun would just suck it in eventually and recycle it?

I imagine because one failed rocket launch would be an extremely undesirable risk not worth taking.

quote:

Originally posted by Austin228:
A huge problem with wind power (current) are those huge wind turbines are not recyclable and end in landfills.

+they really do kill a lot of birds

They also require an immense amount of energy to manufacture, transport, and maintain. The larger units also probably have an oil sump around 600 gallons. Yeah, they require lubrication via oil. Go figure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And yes, they do indeed slaughter a lot of birds. Now just imagine those same dead birds covered in oil. Think the greenies would love wind power then?

We have a dementia patient who makes our energy policies, getting his information from a teenage girl with autism. Am I the only one who thinks this is fucked?

quote:

Originally posted by Blume9mm:
I'm still trying to figure out what is so bad about Carbon Dioxide... is that not what plants breath? Why are we trying to suffocate the trees?

There you go again with your facts and logic. That is NOT to be tolerated here!!!

quote:

Originally posted by Lt CHEG:
Chernobyl never could have happened in the US due to the flawed design of the Soviet RBMK reactor, coupled with the unsafe operational arrogance of the reactor operators and plant management.

Chernobyl, the mini series, is quite horrific and probably doesn't even come close to portraying the true arrogance, ignorance, and negligence that actually took place. Great post, BTW...

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Originally posted by spunk639:
We have a dementia patient who makes our energy policies, getting his information from a teenage girl with autism. Am I the only one who thinks this is fucked?

No.

Also, with regard to CO2, I thought we had recently (2019) passed the point where warming temperatures would melt the arctic permafrost enough to release eons worth of naturally trapped carbon dioxide.

This was supposed to create a negative feedback loop of global warming we couldn’t recover from. As in there would be enough trapped co2 to tip the balance even if all human creation of co2 ended.

Supposedly, we passed that point. So with more gas released, we should see a significant rise in temperature. But, what if we don’t?

Is anyone here familiar with the phenomenon I’m talking about? I’ll try finding a link.

Has anyone watched the video by Sabine Hossenfelder?

I recall reading a while back that nuclear power plants cause a change in the ecosystems of the bodies of water because of the use to cool the reactors.

Many younger conservatives have in my opinion left the battle field on this issue and argue yes its happening, but its to expensive for so little in return. Ben Shapiro is among them. I simply do not think CO2 does what they say it does. Please see the graph. CO2 hardly absorbs across the spectrum. Three tight bands. But, here's what they don't tell you. Look at oxygen. The large band toward the lower down on the scale. Oxygen according to this absorbs just as much as CO2. Add water vapor in and that adds up to the majority of absorption. CO2 makes up 0.4 percent of the atmosphere. Only interacts with a small percentage of IR. And, other gases which man doesn't put into the atmosphere at a great rate do the same thing. What drives temperature is as follows in order of magnitude. 1. Solar output. 2. Distance from Earth to Sun. 3. Angle from Earth to Sun. 4. Position of continents. 5. Composition of atmosphere. atmospheric_transmission by Kent Matthew, on Flickr

Couple things I’d like to add after catching up on this thread:

- a significant amount of nuclear waste is stuff like protective clothing and equipment, pipes, tools, turbines, and stuff like that which may not be made from radioactive material, but has been close enough to that stuff to pick up some radiation.

- sourcing fuel for reactors is still a tricky issue from a geopolitical standpoint. Many sources for it are in areas that don’t like us very much, or have problems with internal stability. Especially if we want to scale up our use of nuclear power, we should look at where we would need to get the raw materials for fuel from.

- No one has built, or to my knowledge even developed a full plan for, a commercial Thorium reactor. I’m not even sure they have successfully demonstrated the fuel cycle on a reasearch scale yet. They are an interesting idea, but nowhere near being commercialized. Fusion does ultimately seem like a much better idea than fission as a power source, but it is probably even further away. We are working what should be humanities first legitimately net-positive reactor, and it is so fantastically expensive that multiple countries had to band together to get it paid for, kinda like CERN. I’m sure we will get something working someday, but fusion isn’t a near-term solution.

- Heating of cooling water reservoirs can be a problem with any power plant running off steam turbines. I’m not sure Nuclear is any worse about it than other types of steam heating, but it might be. Anything using a steam turbine can put out crazy amounts of waste heat and if the source for cooling water is something largely enclosed like a lake or reservoir, it can absolutely heat it up enough to fuck up aquatic life. Maybe it is more common with Nuclear, I’m not really sure, but it isn’t unique to nuclear.

- green-ness aside, we should probably be doing more with Nuclear just to keep our options diversified. If some European countries dependence on one particular fuel source teaches us anything, it’s that it is good to avoid becoming too reliant on only one source of energy.

- Bret

I agree. Thorium is an interesting possibility. Light water reactors were used because we could build bombs with them. And, low level nuclear waste restrictions go way to far. That level is anything that is above 0.01 curies per kilogram must go into a LLW repository. If strictly adhered to a human body has measurable amounts of Carbon14 and Potassium 40. A thyroid test uses Iodine 131 which has a half life of 8 days. That is pissed into the sewer. Plus, hundreds of kilograms of uranium is dumped in this and many other countries everyday contained in coal ash. I support nuclear power. Its the cheapest per kilowatt hour to generate but its critics have a point. It is by far the most expensive and takes the longest to build.

Speaking of Thorium. I came across an article this morning about a company that is proposing to build a floating Thorium reactor based ship to recharge future electric ships, particularly in more remote and environmentally sensitive areas…

https://gcaptain.com/ulstein-t...23&mc_eid=94bc1ac706

As far as I am concerned it’s green, it Glows Green! Seriously though, the high level waste is getting a new lease on life with use in newer much smaller less powerful reactors for use in military and other applications that I have been begging for quite some time. The AF just awarded a pilot project so I’m sure over the next 500 years of study something may pan out!

BTW...CO2, not a problem, never has been.

“Saving the earth” by controlling CO2 is about control and money, not saving the earth.

What’s really crazy (and often overlooked intentionally by the leftist trash bent on forcing us into electric cars that won’t allow you to drive any significant distance) is that the earth had periods of its history with ZERO industrialized infrastructure in which the CO2 content was far higher than it is now. Somehow it did not experience runaway global warming that turned us into Venus.

Likewise, there were periods in which there was little to no ice on the planet, again without the addition of man made pollutants.

The earth is both fragile and resilient. We think in terms of a generation as being relevant. If we had a full on nuclear exchange that wiped out humanity, within a few hundred years life would be thriving.

Interesting thread. My novice opinion would be that it is “green”.