Be Excellent To Each Other

We had discussion a while back about nuclear power; IIRC I was pretty much a lone voice (again ) in not supporting it. Well, this little snippet caught my eye this morning:



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-21298117

...I mean, that's just fucking obscene, isn't it?
£70 billion and NO end in sight, far from it - the ongoing, far from complete "clean up" of but one site has thus far cost every single man, woman and child in this country £1,000 each, with talk of "no indication of when the costs will stop rising".

No doubt few will have also missed last week's news whereby Cumbria rejected calls to chuck this stuff underground in their back yard (despite jobs and cash bribes); so as of now, there's nowhere to store this shit that we do have, let alone future stuff; none of it "safe" for at least one million years, about the same timescale that a bunch of monkeys in Africa starting thinking about walking on their back legs for laffs.

I mean, I really just cannot believe what I'm hearing, nor that anyone in their right mind would still consider nuclear power - with its bottomless pit, complete lack of practicable decommissioning or ongoing safe storage issues. Just get fracking and be bloody quick about it - and start REAL work on REAL renewable power sources such as tidal.

Fracking is far from safe.

I don't get why people think windmills are ugly. Maybe if they built them to look all Dutch and quaint, they might get more love

Yeah, but surely that's a bit of a red herring mate?
Of course, fracking has potentially (and in actuality) major environmental issues; earthquakes/vibration, potential pollution of water table and so on, and they're just the ones I happen know about by watching the news. I don't think anyone would deny it.

But, surely these risks are managable in that they can, through proper mitigation and preventative measures (and regulation) actually *be* managed. Plus, the worst case scenario for fracking doesn't even scratch the surface of nuclear - and the risks of nuclear clearly cannot, even now, be "managed" in any sensible way, unless you call spending £70 billion quid on one site, with no end in sight to that process or costs, and chucking stuff that's lethal for million(s) of years into holes in the ground in any way acceptable, less still risk-free.

I think people do object to their visual impact, yes, but there are other concerns, not least noise. But from my POV the biggest issue is that, fundamentally they make little or no business or environmental sense whatsoever, in many cases? They are, in effect, "a con" - the environmental impact of their manufacture, installation and ongoing maintenance is apparently never recouped through the net energy (after cable losses) obtained during the wind turbine lifetime?

Seems to me they're a bit like those electric cars with umpteen cadmium batteries installed; the car's lifetime carbon offset (even assuming relatively clean at-source power generation, let alone if coal is used) never offsets the huge initial environmental impact of battery and other manufacture, transportation of parts/whole car and finally disposal of pretty awful materials within "bricked" battery packs?

I'm all for clean, renewable power sources but we have to get real about precisely what these are. Tidal power clearly has the potential here; unlike the vagaries of the wind, it's not as though the Moon is going anywhere soon.

Windmills do make sense over their lifespan, without subsidy they repay their financial investment after about fifteen years or so, however their projected lifespan isnt't necessarily much more than that. But the notion that they are a con, is a con.

Large tidal schemes tend to have much longer periods before they repay their initial investment however with moderate maintenance there's no reason why they could not go on generating power for a century or more. But for that reason gettng these off the ground is a far trickier proposition. The government aren't terribly interested in actually getting involved, they want to leave it all to private industry but the energy companies aren't really intersted in long term invesments like that.

I think the problem is that at the moment the full range of risks are not fully known and understood to the degree where I would be comfortable with it going ahead on a scale that would make a difference.

I have my concerns re: nuclear, but the costs of dealing with the weird shit produced would be lower now, and cost to be balanced against the opportunity cost of not have the umpteen gigawatts of energy. I'd not necessarily go ahead with more nuclear either. I'd be interested to learn how other countries with larger nuclear programmes deal with their waste. If someone else has a better answer other than 'bury it somewhere poor' then that could be handy.

Ultimately, I'd like a genuine, thorough review done by independent experts, free of governmental or private enterprise funding, to honestly look at our energy production in short, mid, long and very long term. Unfortunately, call me a cynic, but II just don't think that would ever happen.

Did anyone ever answer my question: What would happen if you dropped nuclear waste into lava?

Radioactive lava.

Sweet

Uranium oxide melts at 2850 degrees C. So, um, I dunno.

Aye, the environmental equivalent of cross-breeding a shark with a dinosaur.

Really? Wow, that's a lot of politicians lying through their teeth then. (Why I should be surprised at such a thing is anyone's guess).
Where can you get informed, unbiased info on stuff like this, do you know please mate?



Yeah, it sucks - and this is where I get my 'left winger' hat on. It's stupid to think that the private sector is going to sort "big, risky stuff" like this - it's not going to happen. Therefore it is the function of government to invest substantial CapEx money on all of our behalfs on stuff like this. I don't want to get party political here as this isn't that type of thread, but to people crying where is the money going to come from, well, I daresay that £37 billion that Labour pissed away on all of our behalfs on useless aircraft carrier(s) and plane(s) would've helped here, as well as £20 billion (min.) on the useless, immoral Trident Missile System. Is anyone seriously going to tell me that, if we'd put £60 billion up for grabs for public tender contract to the private engineering sector, we would not have a fully workable, large scale tidal power system developed, delivered and installed in the UK? With all the jobs and expertise that entails, not to mention energy security and massive green credentials too - with the technology in hand to export to others?

My God, how I awesome would that be, as compared to a bunch of white elephant, useless, borked military hardware. Oh, and how is the likes of HS2, or the Olympics, more important than stuff like this, whilst we're on the subject? That's yet another £45 billion in public money funds, right there. (Don't even get me started on bank bailouts). Politicians annoy me. They suck.

It'd be like a ghastly choc-chip cookie, with "chunks" of nuclear waste being exposed and eroded to the wind or water - a disaster. Basically little different from chucking it off the back of an aeroplane.

There's our next tactic right there!

Just an odd question, why do you think we don't need Aircraft Carriers and planes?

To be honest I mostly take my info for this sort of thing from my dad. He's a retired civil and structural engineer who likes to keep himself busy, he has been getting people interested in a tidal scheme near here. So he's met with a lot of people from various universities, representatives from several energy companies, companies who produce wind and water turbines the MP is round a lot and he's been to the Houses of parliament a few times. He's even been over to other countries to look at projects there. He really isn't prone to flights of fancy and doesn't think that much of wind power but mostly because he thinks that there are better alternatives. So I think that he has probably arrived at a fairly realistic appraisal.

But if you want to see his working then I'm pretty sure that if you asked he'd be happy to go through it in great detail.

I never said that mate.
To a certain extent we do indeed need them (though it'd help if we faced up to our true status in the world and got on with it accordingly) - but we need ones that *work*.

So why won't the QEC 'work'?

Currently we only have a Helicopter Platform, as the Ark etc were retired.

I think as with all things is a problem of balance. Not everyone is worried about power (perhaps we should be) but we do need some of everything. The question is how much and that's where the politics come in to (unfortunately) decide.

I agree we should have a better program for renewable energy. Wind doesn't really seem to have a great return but it's easy to get at. Tidal is much harder to tap into but potentially offers a greater reward. I also think we are missing a trick with Solar too. Yes we are not a massively sunny country but if we invested in solar research perhaps we could also help drive efficiency to improve it enough for better use here?

As for Nuclear I have to say I quite like it. Yes it's expensive and we should move away from it when other areas offer better return but modern power stations are much more efficient and safe.

It's the long term storage of Nuclear waste that worries me as all we keep doing is keeping this dangerous stuff in temporary buildings and moving it around. Having somewhere permanent and purpose build would improve safety and reduce longer term costs. However no one wants it on their land.


What are the real alternatives?

UK energy policy:

Solar: "It varies by the amount of light and can't hope to cover all our needs." "Right, bin it!"
Wind: "People don't like the turbines, and there return isn't all that great, despite it doing really well in Germany. Also, it's not enough to cover all our needs." "Germans, eh? Bin it!"
Tidal: "We have lots of tidal power, but it'll take ages to get a return—it's long-term. Plus it's not enough to cover all our needs." "Long term? Bin it!"

…

"Hang on. Why don't we just invest in all of these things in a big way? Maybe back it up with nuclear, and sell excess energy overseas?" "Foreigners? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? Get me Fracking HQ on the phone right now. I WANT EARTHQUAKES!"

If you stuck a solar panel on every house in the UK, that would at least take some pressure off.

As always though, you have to factor in the environmental impact of manufacturing the things in the first place

I don't think we have the efficiency we need on any of the Solar, Wind, Tidal renewables.

I think it's basically a choice of Research (in above), Nuclear, Fossils over the long term.

and Nuclear or Fossils short term.

What's wrong with dumping the waste in the deepest ocean we can find. Water really is an excellent radiation shield.

Half the problem with Sellafield isn't actually waste from power generation. There's 2 prototype reactors there used for weapons development in the 1950's, one of which caught fire causing the worst nuclear accident ever in the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

They've spent a fortune cleaning up that mess and it won't be sorted until 2037. They were rushing to create a British nuclear bomb in the 1950's with little regard or understanding of what they were doing.

Even the first power station on-site was mainly used for creating weapons grade plutonium for the first few years.

Every new build should have the things by default, by law. Instead, the government is regularly trying to cut subsidies for the things, thereby reducing already shaky demand from homeowners to retrofit solar.


[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_GermanyThe Germans seem to be doing OK.[/url] The UK has more potential for tidal and, from what I've read in the past, similar capacity for wind.

Perhaps it's naive to ever think we could rely solely on renewables, but I'd argue it's also crazy not to try and rely on them as much as possible. Instead, we talk to the Irish and the Icelanders about tapping into their fuel, while importing from elsewhere at great expense. Being at the whims of other countries regarding power just seems like the craziest long-term strategy around.

That's an argument against governments, not nuclear power.

I agree with much of that, but for me it still always comes back to the inherent, irreducible *immense* toxicity and longevity of nuclear waste? Yes, I'm sure "modern" reactors are better, produce less waste, are safer - but the end result is still, surely, essentially the same?

You're right to point out that nuclear is hugely expensive anyway; the private sector won't touch it in the UK as we found out recently - so are we really saying we should be pumping billions of public money pound notes into something that no-one wants anywhere near them, they certainly don't want any of the waste products anywhere near them - and on top of the massive construction and operational costs relative to other power sources, the eventual decommissioning financial liability, per reactor, rivals the cost of, for example, the c.£50 Billion the UK spends on education per year?

With respect, that's a tad hysterical and stereotypical mate.
But I agree with you about tidal power.

I think you're seriously underestimating both the actual toxicity of nuclear waste (for instance, one-millionth of one gram of plutonium - a very heavy metal after all - is enough to kill a man), and its longevity (millions of years). Although, granted, that's pretty much what we did used to do I think.

On this scale of harm, for stuff that stays around for this long, chucking into the ocean isn't going to cut it. Concrete corrodes, breaks down in mere tens of years; ocean currents distribute material; it is taken up by organisms and so on. Over the course of a few hundred years, let alone millions, this stuff will, thanks to an ever increasing entropy, the most fundamental law of the entire universe - find its way everywhere. And the susceptibility of the genome of any life form - let alone man - to radiation, cannot be overstated.

Pity Gaywood doesn't appear to be around. Although he'd doubtless call me a twonk over this, I suspect he'd be fair-minded enough to shed much more light on this particular aspect than I can, for instance.

Cheers for sharing that Grim... most interesting thing I've read in a while. Wonder what happened to the guy and his hand though? Did his hand detach and crawl about and try to kill him? I'm sure at this point Chinny will offer up a Pertwee Doctor Who to confirm this, as I vaguely remember seeing something of the sort as a chiddler.

I always loved that massively implausible but awesome bit in Edge of Darkness when Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker attack the mine-shaft plutonium plant.

Not really. The key issue here is the sheer intractability of the issue of decontamination and making safe spent nuclear reactors, which is solely and uniquely a function of nuclear energy per se. We can doubtless criticise the idiocy of successive governments for allowing their scientists, with their crass vanity, to talk them into "too cheap to meter" nuclear energy schemes without even a decommissioning strategy - and I do, thus saddling us all with an obscene legacy and costs - but let's not make the same mistake again, now. We must not kid ourselves that anything has *really* changed, whilst we're still talking about chucking this stuff in holes in the ground for a million years or more, in the same breath. It's obscene; the epitome of shortsightedness and "out of sight, out of mind". Appalling.

Chuck the waste in lava, then the lava in the water. Solved.

I'm chucking it in your mum. Oh yes indeedy.

Isn't there some anti-plutonium out there? Can't we use that? Or get Levar Burton to think of something?

Theoretically there *is* such a thing as "anti-Plutonium", believe it or not.
But we could never assemble even so much as a single atom of the stuff, with present technologies, and we wouldn't want to anyway - the resultant energy liberated from perhaps combining a few grams of plutonium and anti-plutonium (or indeed anti-plutonium with *anything*, even just air) would be enough to boil all the world's oceans.

Make some cooler anti-plutonium.

You're very welcome.

Oops.

I think I'm drinking too much coffee.

Don't mention it.



Tom Baker in Sarah-Janes last story:



Shot in a real nuclear power station yet to be commissioned*. They used to let you do things like that. Claws of Axos a few years before saw aliens trying to suck all the power out of Dungeness.

Anyone here ever been out to Dungeness. Freaky place. Apparently the nuclear people spend a fortune on the upkeep of the shingle sea defences.


* The exteriors and the turbine hall bits. The scenes in the core were done at TV Centre for obvious reasons

Erm, why can't we dump it in lava, again? That sounds like a great idea. Such that I'm amazed no one has come up with it before. Scientists are stupid. Stupid scientists.

Lava can't destroy radioactive nuclei, only dilute them.

So the ideas is akin to 'chuck it in a lake.'

Except the lake is really hot.

And it will create radioactive lava men that will kill us all.

Also: the long term solution, is and always will be:

a) Fusion
b) renewables + massively curbing Earth's population and/or standard of living
or
c) Medieval a go go.

I often spend bus journeys worrying about all the alien races that burnt their oil before they bootstrapped cheap energy, stuck for eternity at smart-medieval. No way off their rock.

I also wonder if the average age of those civilisations outlasts the civs that do manage to bootstrap cheap energy...

Put it all in a big rocket and fire it at the sun.

I can see no downsides.

If you've not seen it, Into Eternity about this place is fascinating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spe ... repository

A *nuclear* rocket!

I find it weird to put into perspective in the grand scheme of things. We have only been burning all our fossil fuels for the past 200 years or so, and there are worries we are running out soon, however soon that turns out to be.
In the grand scheme of the life of the planet, our whole use of energy on this scale is a "what the fuck was that?" blip.

This, basically.

I went to see the JET test bed back when I was in school. It was aces. They had these wonderful efficiency graphs for when they thought they'd achieve more energy out than energy in. They'd predicted having nuclear fusion reactors generating electricity in the lab by now. The problem has been a very considerable shortage of funds. It's not being taken seriously enough.

The Americans must surely be devleoping one as well, though? Or are they relying on that cold fusion wizard?