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It’s great until it does the Fukushima thing or the Chernobyl thing or the Three Mile Island thing. Or until you have to take care of the radioactive leftovers for 100,000 years.I wonder what role nuclear power may play in powering the grid, given its gradually increased attention and demand for electricity.
It sounds like newer generations of nuclear plants are designed in ways that will mitigate these issues. Such as reactors that are generated with use of nuclear waste rods, thus decreasing radioactive leftovers.It’s great until it does the Fukushima thing or the Chernobyl thing or the Three Mile Island thing. Or until you have to take care of the radioactive leftovers for 100,000 years.
Not quite. The cost is higher due to the price of the panels. Payback is on the order of 20 - 30 years, not including maintenance. How many of those panels will require replacement after the end of the payback time is an open question.
Energy storage isn't included in this expense. Unfortunately, solar doesn't work well in the dark and cloud cover can diminish output. To make both solar and wind live up to their potential, you need some way to store that electricity for when output is less than optimal or non-existent. While there's various schemes for doing so, there isn't enough to back up installed capacity.
Some of it may be the level of radioactivity and half-life. Let's see...A check shows Cesium 137 is one byproduct, and that has a half-life of 30.05 years. Keep in mind that half-life means half will be decayed in 30.05 years, then half of what remains will have decayed in another 30.05 years, and so on. Strontium 90 has a half-life of 28.8 years. Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,211 years. How much Pu 239 is in waste, though? Same for Iodine 129, which has a half-life of 15,700,000 years.There doesn't seem to be an issue with digging up radioactive materials from underground to supply nuclear power plants, so I'm not sure why anyone would take issue with putting the radioactive waste back where the raw materials were found.
The Uranium fuel cycle is complex all the way, with mining and concentrating not being as clean as we would like to pretend. Then there is the production of strange isotopes that need to be 'handled' for who knows how long. The use of Thorium instead of Uranium may be more promising. Another thing that MAY be of some utility is low level plants whose basic purpose is desalinization, not requiring excessively hot new cores.It sounds like newer generations of nuclear plants are designed in ways that will mitigate these issues. Such as reactors that are generated with use of nuclear waste rods, thus decreasing radioactive leftovers.
Barely - compared to nuclear. Once we get the legal framework right, there are technologies that can recycle solar panels and they'll get cheaper with scale.Manufacturing of solar cells and lithium batteries produce toxic by-products.
I totally agree! Because wind and solar are so cheap we don't need normal ON-river PHES. But as a battery? It's awesome! The world has an abundance of potential electrical storage in OFF storage in PHES (Pumped Hydro Electricity Storage.)Erecting dams for hydroelectric power destroys local ecosystems and can introduce harmful species into the area.
WIND power has the reputation of killing rarer birds of prey, and many bats. The tips of the turbine blades are moving at 300 km per hour. But many wind farms now have bird radar that will switch off wind farms if threatened species fly through. Air-horns blast near some wind farms. Sonic devices ward off bats. Phd in Wind technology Rosie Barnes explains.Wind turbines kills lots of birds as well as solar furnaces.
Of course! The Energy Transition requires a lot of mining as well. But if we monitor all these things and improve on them as we go, boy are there some opportunities to save some money!It seems that there is really no "clean energy". Perhaps the best solution is just cut down on activities that use up lots of energy.
You might not have wanted to bring up the Maldives. They were supposed to have been underwater. The Canberra Times on Monday, September 16, 1988, ran a story predicting that the Maldives would be underwater within 30 years. We are now six years past that point, and the Maldives are still above water.
The odd thing is that the number of islands in the Maldives may be increasing. Found this behind a paywall at The New York Times. It matches some research I'd heard of that turned up the same thing in other parts of the Pacific , but didn't know that this same thing was observed in the Maldives. It could be widespread elevation rise of the seabed itself or something else going on, but suffice to know that the Maldives are still with us six years after they were supposed to have vanished beneath the waves.
Science is supposed to happen when someone notices something and says "That's funny," The Maldives are a case in point. They were predicted to vanish by 2018 but didn't. Why? Just like you'd expect Savannah, Georgia, to be warmer now than it was in the 18th Century, but the official recorded high, from the 20th Century, ties an observed high from the 18th. Why wasn't the official high warmer? The local weather recording station I keep up with has shown a decline in temperatures since about 2015. Why? Something's not tracking here.
What then? Throw out observations that doesn't agree with "experts?" Accept by faith that the experts must always be right and are without error? Give experts the same deference once reserved for high priests?
Why are the wealthy elites still buying beach front properties if they truly believe sea levels are going to rise significantly?
Top Study Confirms Carbon Dioxide Has Zero Impact on ‘Global Warming’
Top Study Confirms Carbon Dioxide Has Zero Impact on 'Global Warming' - Slay News
A major new study has debunked the narrative that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activity is causing so-called "global warming."slaynews.com
it is all about carbon taxes and to get in our pockets, Madness, and greed.
that experiment in the video shows that CO2 absorbs heat yes but how much per volume? how much CO2 was there in that tube?, he said filled so about 100% co2, do you agree?Really? You read one study without reading the peer review?
----CARBON BRIEF REPLIES BELOW----As previously mentioned, people continue to make claims questioning CO2’s ongoing capacity to function as a greenhouse gas – namely, that it can ‘no longer warm Earth’s atmosphere because CO2 is saturated’. However, this claim is far from being new. In fact, it originated in the early 20th century when the study of the greenhouse effect (prior to be coined as such) was in its infancy. From the timeline we shared earlier, you will recall that in 1896, Svante Arrhenius quantified the warming effect from increasing atmospheric CO2. In 1900, Knut Ångström, Swedish physicist, used experimental data – later found to be inaccurate[4] – to claim that CO2 is unable to affect Earth’s climate because of saturation of the center of the absorption band (around 15 nanometers) and overlap between the absorption bands of CO2 and water vapor. Despite being debunked decades ago (as will be explained below), people continue to share these claims. Below we will explain why these claims are incorrect based on available evidence...How CO2 warms Earth through the greenhouse effect and why CO2 is not ‘saturated’ in Earth’s atmosphere - Science Feedback
There is no doubt about it – climate science can be complex. But sometimes this complexity is mistaken for uncertainty. A recurring example is our scientific understanding of carbon dioxide’s (CO2) effects as a greenhouse gas[2]. However, the evidence for CO2 as a greenhouse gas is...science.feedback.org
The reality is climate science is hard, and people online get into echo-chambers often funded by Big Oil and then think there's an 'authority' they can just believe that the whole thing is a conspiracy theory. It's easy to write a controversial paper and then have
It was a century and a half before the UN even existed when Joseph Fourier discovered that the Earth's atmosphere is what keeps the Earth so much warmer than the moon. He discovered this in the 1820's - about 200 years ago - and decades before Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto! Or how did some mythical “Cabal of the Elite” in the UN get to Eunice Foote in 1856 when she discovered CO2 is the primary warming gas? Scientists understood physics of climate change in the 1800s – thanks to a woman named Eunice Foote
What about the fact that CO2’s effects can be studied and confirmed in any decent physics lab or even a backyard workshop on the planet? Variations of this next test can be replicated in any decent physics lab on the planet. Check this test -
Mythbusters even ran a backyard test that confirmed it.
It's not relevant - it's just to illustrate the physics. Watch the mythbusters one which tries to simulate our atmosphere more accurately.that experiment in the video shows that CO2 absorbs heat yes but how much per volume? how much CO2 was there in that tube?, he said filled so about 100% co2, do you agree?
I don't know much at all - I have a social sciences background, not physics and chemistry. But I can read what actual climatologists say - and the cherry-picking lies funded by Big Oil never add up. There are always inconsistencies or just half truths.You dont know that at equal atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and H2O water vapour, the water vapour absorbs 300 times more infrared ( HEAT) than CO2! they don't tell you that in the news.
And a tiny little funnel-web bite at even smaller concentrations of venom per volume of blood will still kill you.atmospheric concentration of CO2 is now 420 ppm ot 0.042%
atmospheric concentration of water vapour varies between 2 % and 5% dependant on humidity levels.
Oh it's the sun! It's only number 2 on the climate sceptic scale.the sun cycles are the cause;
Yeah - "they" DON'T show us fraudulent graphs from a Christian end-times type that gets his reading of climate science from the bible - but has NO climate credentials whatsoever. Randy Mann is a geographer.
It’s great until it does the Fukushima thing or the Chernobyl thing or the Three Mile Island thing. Or until you have to take care of the radioactive leftovers for 100,000 years.
I'm Australian and our culture is just anti-nuclear. I became SO concerned about our reliance on fossil fuels - both because of peak oil looming sometime soon, then peak gas, and eventually even peak coal, that I debated some nuclear types - and then was won over. Nukes are a lot safer than coal, oil, and gas which kill millions of people a year through particulates. But nuclear waste? Doesn't that have to be stored for 100,000 years?
Here's what I found out. Nuclear 'waste' is not a problem, but could be another solution to climate change!
There are special reactors called nuclear BREEDER reactors.
Breeders actually reprocess used nuclear fuel rods, and get 90 TIMES the energy out of it.
We can get important medical isotopes out of it.
It fissions away much of the quantity of waste as all those atoms keep splitting.
Finally - we take the REAL waste (the broken atoms we call Fission Products) and melt it into ceramic tablets and bury them in a bunker on site.
Then in just 500 years it’s safe! Radioactive waste goes in, produces heaps of energy, and never comes out again.
See this Argonne Labs video - 4 minutes.
But after over a decade of being pro-nuclear - I now don't think most of the world will need it because renewables are now SO cheap that I've flipped back to them again. They're just so cheap we can Overbuild them across a vast area and have super-abundant energy.
But what about all that nuclear waste? I say if a larger nation like the USA or EU or China wanted to do the world a service, they could have a few big nuclear breeder reactor parks that slowly eat through the world's radioactive waste. Those huge concrete & steel dry cask storage cases go in - and never come out again. And who knows? Maybe that nuclear reactor park is running the local steel industry or desalinating water for a desert country somewhere. It's just more expensive. Yet I would be happy it was there - dealing with the waste and making useful products.
I am reassured.Bill Gates wants to build small reactors that are cooled by liquid metal and can't melt down.
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