Is nuclear energy "green" energy?

"which is economical and reduces the amount of long term radioactive waste."

The operative word here is "REDUCE" 10% as much deadly, long half life Nuke waste is still deadly, still too much!

Icarus

 

Nuclear is just one of many options we need to pursue. We need them all. Only nuclear is going to replace coal in providing large amounts of baseline power with no carbon emissions.

I am having wind and solar be at least 15% of our power supply (so we have a long way to go before we get there). Beyond that it is hard to deal with the random nature of wind and solar. You need to build the solar installation and a fast reacting gas power plant to back it up once you pass a certain level of wind power. Load leveling technologies will help but you can only go so far before a calm day would require you use another source.

 

Count me in on the pool heating group. It has plusses and minuses (see RIKLBLOG-We Interrupt This Blog... ) but it does avoid the problem of concentrating all that nuclear waste in one place.

Lest we forget, except for tidal power, everything is nuclear. It's just that one nuclear reactor is 93 million miles away, which makes us feel safe, and we live on the other one and are used to it by now.

Richard

 

I don't buy many of the arguments made about the need for so much power. Efficiency improvement is the missing link in most of this--as in we need to quit wasting so much. Say we got serious and did something rather basic: cut our per capita energy consumption roughly in half over the next 20-30 years. With that the need for coal plants completely disappears.

The contributions from wind are ramping up quickly enough. Solar is lagging badly. The targets set so far have been unambitious and uninspired. Combine national targets of 3% annual reduction in residential electrical consumption along with doubling solar/wind etc. capacity every three years. In ten years you have 24% demand reduction, and solar/wind/etc. would be at 20% of total production. If the reduction all came out of coal generation the change would be enormous.

I'm fine with having fossil fuel generation stations as back ups.

 

Very little of it is fission. Fusion powered is a much different animal. I'm all for skipping fission and getting to what we should have been focused on for the past 30 years: fusion.

 

Even tidal power is nuclear. Our moon and sun were created and put into motion by the explosion of another star or stars.

From an even broader view, the universe is like a big roller coaster. The Big Bang was the hoist at the start of the ride. Everything after that has been coasting.

Tom

 

References please. I have only been able to determine that 1 fast breeder reactor is currently producing electricity in France.

The rest are typical fission reactors.

 

Definitely - I suspect that nearly all houses in America could improve insulation by a significant degree significantly reducing heating/cooling costs. Most offices are even worse - my office at work has huge glass single pane windows and R11 tossed about above the ceiling panels. Get R30 into the ceiling and get low-e, double pane windows (or equivalent) and our heating/cooling costs would drop significantly.

On board with you there - IMO, we need to push for more cost-effective solar installs on existing rooftops. Most rooftops have more than enough space with current panel technology to produce more than enough energy for that building. And solar produces power when demand is at it's highest - it even reduces demand on hot sunny days since it blocks the sun from directly heating the building.

Panel prices have dropped significantly in the past year, but that's mostly due to reduced demand. Even so, panel prices have dropped enough that they are only about half the cost of your typical install - the rest is in inverters, mounting hardware and labor, so more attention needs to be focused there as well.

 

Once again, Shawn has it right!

In the Solar Energy world, we counsel clients all the time that their cheapest energy dollar is conservation. In rough numbers every dollar spent on conservation will save ~$10 in Pv costs for example.

To those that suggest we can't do this, I say Bull! You are short sighted and cheap. Take my own example in just the last 10 years. ( We were pretty energy frugal before so the savings would be even greater for an 'average household".

We used to drive a Saab turbo, and a Suburban. Routinely would drive to jobs in the suburban at ~11mpg. The Saab got ~18-20 mpg. We also would commute between the Pacific NW and Northern Ontario Canada 2-3 times a year in the Suburban.

We now drive a 07 Prius, a Subaru outback wagon, and a 82 VW rabbit pick up. We have reduced the transcontinental trips to 2 a year, and we either drive the Pruis, or the Subaru in the winter The fuel mileage has gone from ~11 to 50+ in the Prius, or 11 to 28 in the Subaru, giving an average of ~40, a net reduction of almost 75%!

When we are home, we drive less, consolidate trips more etc. But even not changing the driving habits (which Americans are loath to do) we went from 11 mpg in the Suburban to 34 in the VW truck, reducing fuel consumption by 66%! Going from the Saab to the Prius went from 20 to 50 mpg, another 60% decrease.

So net/net, we probably burn 12-25% as much fuel as we burned ten years ago, all without changing our habits one bit! (By changing the habits a bit, consolidating trips etc, driving net/net less, we are probably down to 15% in total.)

The same goes for the house. CFLs have reduced our lighting ~75% Adding insulation to the floor and attic (the cheapest and easiest places to add insulation to) reduced our heating fuel by ~20%. Changing our heat system to hi efficiency room heaters (Rinnais) with programmable T-stats, drop the fuel by another ~15%. Adding insulated window quilts dropped heat loss through the glass, reducing the heating another ~5%. So I would guess, our total heating load has been reduced close to 50%. Solar pre-heated water reduces our already low hot water cost (we have had demand hot water for 30 years!) by about 75% on a annual basis. Outlet strips on electronics so that the phantom loads are gone as much as possible. Lap tops instead of desk machines, except for very heavy graphic or photo work. I could go on and on, but little of this has come at any change in lifestyle, and most came with little cost net/net. Most cost pay back the first year with just the energy savings.

So on balance, we were pretty "green" for decades, but now with little effort, and little expense, we have reduced our total energy use by about 75%. So as Shawn mentions, we could easily get everyone to get to 50% IF we had a progressive energy policy that encouraged people to conserve.

Icarus

 

Reread my post, where I point out that all reactors are breeders of a sort, but not "fast" breeders. I was very careful in my wording, but apparently not careful enough.

Tom

 

But we need to cut our carbon emissions by about 80%, so just halving our energy consumption is not sufficient.

While our current energy sinks need to be made much more efficient, I believe that for technological and industrial advancements, we will have a very strong demand for increased energy supply.

I believe that 3% annual reduction of residential energy (not just electrical) consumption is essential. But the 3 year doubling time in solar/wind capacity is a factor of over 1000 over 30 years, which is simply absurd. Not going to happen.

 

Lovelock is correct. It's good that he finally saw the light.

There is no fundamental problem with breeders, which both stretch the fuel supply and reduce the remaining high-level waste by a factor of 10x to 100X. And when we finally run out of uranium the Earth has enough thorium to supply all conceivable energy needs for thousands of years. But of course, people being what they are, we'll probably have to give our own noses a good rubbing in the twin dung heaps of carbon dioxide pollution and economic privation for another decade or two before we get really serious about it.

 

As far as the issue of PV production, is one of the toxic materials used to produce them. I have no problem with a dramatic ramping up of PV panel production, but I want it done in India or China.

We are very hypocritical in trying to find a "green" energy solution, while ignoring the fact that only 5% of the global population can live like we do. Unless we prohibit third world nations from enjoying the same standard of living that we have, we have to accept that the best scenario is to have "natural" breeder reactors like CANDU, along with extensive fuel reprocessing

As far as the quaint idea of putting the spent bundles into an old mining pit, I should expound on that disaster: the spent bundles would simply melt their way down.

The "China syndrome"

The French have proven that they can make nuclear energy work. A lot of their research/design is based on ideas first promoted by AECL. For whatever reason, Canada took world leadership in civilian nuclear energy, and pissed it away

We need energy options not only for North America, but for the EU, and especially for the rest of the world that we very conveniently ignore

 

It's not absurd, you are looking at the wrong time scale with your projection.

I was looking at 3 year doubling for roughly 10 years as an example of a powerful short term approach. It is not absurd, and the reason I chose it is that wind has been on track to do that on its own. According to a wiki table U.S. installed capacity went from 2,500 MW in 1999 to 25,000 MW in 2008. Solar has a lot greater growth potential (if it ever gets momentum) because it has a much lower starting point (~8,800 MW in 2008.)

At about that point (10 years out) I anticipate further increases to be much slower, just like early efficiency improvements are much easier than later ones.

You are unlikely to sell folks on cutting carbon emissions by 80% over any time scale. So work on smaller time scales and smaller annual figures. Compounding is a powerful thing.

Getting a 50% reduction over the longer period sure beats a 20% growth rate.

 

We will need more power if we switch to electric cars. We are still having population growth in the world and in the USA.

We have reduced our household electricty use by 40% (lighting and computers mostly) and do have the possibility to reduce further with on demand water heating. Cutting energy use per capital could be done quite quickly with incentives like the window and door credits from the government. If we did the same for ground source heat pumps a huge amount of energy could be saved.

 

There is more than carbon emissions to consider. Coal also means mercury and radio isotopes dumped in the atmosphere. Solar, wind, and tidal would be great, but there isn't enough public pressure for them at the moment, and power plants are being built now. Better a nuke than a coal.

 

Yes, we will need more electricity for EVs, but that will be more than made up by the decrease in consumption in ICE vehicles. Additionally, EV's have the ability to be 2 way energy sources. That is they can both sell to the grid as well as buy from the grid, allowing EVs to be a large de centralized battery bank to even out the solar and wind peaks, as well as allowing these batteries to reduce peak generating capacity. (See Dennis Hayes of the Bullet foundation for his treatise on the subject,, very smart!)

Icarus

 

Electric cars will provide some benefits (despite the resultant retention of coal plants.) 1. For a hybrid owner like me next to a coal plant, EV at present kWh/mile is a net increase in CO2. However, EV's are going to encourage "downsizing" vehicles and reducing the kWh/mile. The vehicles likely removed from the road will have several times the carbon footprint of my Prius or a coal fired EV. 2. The charging should be possible in off peak hours--it will level the load. 3. It will enourage adoption of residential PV solar, because with net metering there will be a substantial baseload on your bill for charging the car.

Our population growth will be an issue, but if we're already doing aggressive per capita energy reduction, it can be managed. Without reduction you get that 20% or so growth I mentioned.

 

Its the better way to reproduce the energy from the nuclear waste or fossils. Its the best usage of fossils and nuclear waste.

 

My issue with nuke waste is not the technology to do so, but the human element that has to be failsafe for generations. As I have said too many times before, until you can prove to me that it can me made save for the time involved in it's natural hazard life, then I will have to vote no!

As Jay suggests, (as have I and others) as long as N. Americans and to some extent Europeans are going to live higher on the the hog than we have any right to we are stuck. Until we wake up and realize that some sacrifice is going to be needed and to a great extent, we are the ones that are going to have to make it.

Icarus