h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The nuclear power industry has a saying about environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists: "Let them freeze in the dark."

There are people who oppose operating power plants in their area, and cause no end of trouble to those trying to build new power plants. Thus, in America, mountains of regulations have been created to impede the process of getting government approval to build any power plant, to say nothing of the pain involved in getting approval for a nuclear power plant (no new nuclear plants have gone on-line in America in almost 20 years).

However, much as people would like to ignore it, there would be no need for nuclear or fossil plants if there wasn't so much demand for electricity. It is unreasonable for people to protest building a power plant and then go home and turn on their computers, televisions, and light bulbs without considering the consequences of their actions. It is similar to driving your car to a refinery so you can protest against the oil industry.

Energy is not free. There is yet no practical way to create useful energy without impacting the environment in some way that someone won't like. Fossil power plants pollute the air and are noisy. Nuclear power plants create nuclear waste. Solar cells take up a lot of room. Biomass is fancy, politically correct term for burning garbage. Hydro power causes changes to river life downstream of the dams. Wind turbines are an eyesore.

OK every source of power has it's disadvantages but surely we should assess the long term impact of them all and decide which is the least harmfaul and most sustainable. Or do you think we should just give in and use what we have regardless until we've ruined the planet?

Besides what's wrong with burning garbage, taking up a lot of room and looking unaesthetic compared to all the problems of nuclear and fossil fuel systems?

And yes maybe we should think about how we use power- governments tend to think on election term timetable rather than long term sustainability timescales

Yes, the technology development of our Civ runs on oil and electricity. And sure the demand make us turn to the most productive way of making them.
And yes, many people (me included) do not fully understand the result of our way of life. 20 percent of the world population uses up 80% of the total engery need. I'll bet this is more or less the same proportions when it comes down to food - too.

But do NOT forget that if there is a will there is a way. And truth is that many new discoveries and innovations are either held back or totaly stopped by economical forces that do not want the present situation to change. These forces will not allow a shift in power and money that would be the result.
Think about it: if every family could have a personal supply of endless energy there would be big change of power in the world. Energy, food and water are the three big things that runs the world. Make these decentrelised and things will become very different.

Also,
It is not the single individual who has created this way of life. It is the collective that is responsible for this. Companies and economic forces in bed with human need for improvments. It is to late to blame people being numb-minded about it. The damage is allready done.

I'm not arguing that we should just give into the impact we're having.

I'm saying that people are very short-sighted in their arguments. They will eagerly use electriciy but will not permit plants to be built in their area. For example, the San Francisco Bay Area badly needs electricity (there have been periodic rolling blackouts all summer) but recently, the city of San Jose successfully blocked a new gas fired turbine plant from being built in their area. What steams me up is that it's the big companies in San Jose, as well as residents, who are also complaining to the utilities about how they don't like their power being cut out because there's not enough to go around, but they'll turn around and say they want a new plant, but "not in my backyard."

People are willing to accept the benefits of technology but none of the disadvangates.

With biomass, I think that most people don't realize what it is. They hear the word "bio" in an energy source and think it's something that won't pollute, when in truth it is a new name for an old process. I've even heard some people say that biomass is letting biological material (grass clippings, mostly) decompose and using the heat from the process to make steam and run turbines. Any engineer or biologist will laugh you right out of the room if you said that.

As far as sustainability, I can poke a hole in that really easy. One of the most abundant sources of energy on earth is uranium. Using breeder reactors, which turn the common, unfissionable form of uranium (U-238) into fissionable material, one can extract enough uranium dissolved in seawater to provide electricity for millenia.

The disadvantage is the waste involved, of course. That brings me to my next point. When protesting nuclear plants, people conveniently forget how fossil plants put out smoke and other emmissions. Compared to the short term impact of burning oil (respiratory problems, acid rain, greenhouse effect, etc.) the short term impact of nuclear waste is relatively benign. The only thing is that nuclear waste sticks around for much longer. Properly stored, however, it can be kept away from groundwater and other ways of ingestion and made, if not safe, then contained. The most promising way of treating waste has been proposed for the Handford, US nuclear weapons facility, where waste will be heated and turned into glass, and then poured into concrete cylinders to be buried. While this isn't perfect, no one has yet come up with a better way.

Which brings me to my last point. People love to criticize things, but no one ever proposes a better way. The nuclear industry (and the energy industry at large, except big oil) would love it if people came up with more environmental friendly ways of making energy. No one ever does, or what they do come up with is so expensive no energy consumer will pay for it. We make money by making and providing energy. If you show us a clean and economical way to do it, we'll jump all over it. But in the meantime, don't impede our work. You're the ones who complain if we can't deliver energy when you want it.

Wow, what a challange your reply is.

Ok first of I would like to say that I'm not from the US so I can not really argue anything about local or national situations over there.
I live in Sweden and our source of power comes mainly from three places: Water, nuclear and coal. These are the primary. The secondary are: Solar, Wind and Gas.
Not long ago a investigation turned up an unexpected finding about the company (proffesional ?) use of electricity. A study showed with all clearity that huge amounts of energy could be saved if the 'morals' of companies improved, and in combination with newer sensor technology etc. Up to four nuclear plants, which by the way is more than Sweden has in total at the moment. This is a very big saving in enery. Oh I know this is not a final solution to anything but electricity tend to be taken for granted and often not much is being done to actually save it from being used where it is not necessary. If you transfer this to normal public energy spending too there at least is substantial saving to be made. I''ll bet this argument can be ablied almost everywhere.

The problem is however that most people think that not used enery is simply stored away somewhere, to be used in another time and place. This is of course not correct. Not used enery are sold and therefor the actuall saving is more or less elmiminated and you keep the overhead of energy spending. Hm....what next.....?

I'm very pleased to hear that you will not simply give in. Good.

Yes we are short term thinking individuals. Most of us are not even able to thing further away than our own life time, let alone our childrens life time, or their children. This makes everything difficult.
I think, and this is very much my own idea, people in general takes things as they are. They do accept benefits and they DO (most of the time) understand to some degree the the less positive side of these benefits. We do not really have any choice do we? Going back to the stoneage is not an option.

I will not disagree with you that nuclear power do have it's advantages. But it's also have more 'hidden' dangers. As nuclear power goes I think the 'fission-era' is quite primitive. I hope the technology brings forward ways of passing the human race into the 'fusion-era' sooner than later. At least as a safer platform until more permanent sources of energy are developed.

As for gas turbines, based on decomposing biomass, it's not such an bad idea as you make it out to be. It the engineers, as you put it, find it so amusing, maybee they should investigate it a little bit further. For instance, in India existing technology has been used in new ways to create good energyplants (on small local areas) by using waste products from their multitude of cows. The system provides not only gas for running electricity generators but also cheap buring gas for stoves and alike. It is cheap, reasonable clean, locally produced and efficient. And similar projects have proved very successful in other parts of the world too.
I do not say this is some ultimate solution but it goes to show that just maybe there are other ways to deal with the whole issue of energy, ways that are either suppressed or ignored or simply not discovered yet. It may even be easy solutions - who knows?

And last but not least:

" If you show us a clean and economical way to do it, we'll jump all over it. But in the meantime, don't impede
our work. You're the ones who complain if we can't deliver energy when you want it."

The above sentence from the very end of your reply, makes me think that maybe you your self are working in the energy business? If not it makes no sence. So I will go for the notion of mine that you do.

The fact that I and others 'impede' (as you put it) your work is simply not true. To argue, investigate or disagree something is NOT to imede. It is not alone our responsability to create solutions. One side of it is that since the product being created, are coming from you, you as a supplier are responsable for inventing new products. When ever have the buyer of a car, for instance, had the responsability to come up with a new and better car model. The same argument are appliable to energy.
And yes customers complain when they do not get what they pay for. But sooner or later they too realise that there are limits. The equation has to be balanced in some manner. Not any price is acceptable. So do not try turning the wheel on us here. Do not hide behind it in this way. Come up with something better instead!

Otherwise...good reply!

regards!

Out of curiosity, how much damage does the environment receive from a pile of nuclear waste buried in a mountain? A couple inches of lead and a mountain suffice to protect NORAD from a nearby nuclear blast; shouldn't as much contain nuclear waste?

The issue that most concerns people isn't the immediate environmental damage. It's the continuing risk of radioactive exposure over time. A couple of inches of lead and a mountain may protect against a nuclear bomb, but it's not guaranteed to hold a thousand fifty-five gallon drums of radioactive liquid without leaking for the next few centuries. Imagine the brouhaha that would erupt if any of that got into anyone's drinking water.

Plus, the political impact of burying nuclear waste is immense. It would take a lot of persuading to get someone to let you put that stuff in their backyard.

So put it in a dry, desolate place such as Antarctica, the Sahara, or even Nevada. Antarctica's the perfect place to store nuclear waste because its population is miniscule and it's big. As for the nuclear plants themselves, put lead and concrete around them in several layers; they're safe.

People used to think the same thing about the ocean floor; seal toxic waste in drums that are denser than water and sink them, and we'll never have to deal with them again. The problem is that the drums eventually started to leak and we had to deal with it again.

Antarctica has glaciers that could melt into seawater. The Sahara has high winds that can blow radioactive dust around. Nevada has people living there. No matter where you put it, you'll have to deal with it eventually. Not that I don't think those aren't good ideas; those are actually reasonably good places to store the waste, all things considered. One just has to realize that there's not going to be a perfectly, permanently sealed place that no waste will ever escape from, which is where most people want to dump the stuff.

As for putting layers of lead and concrete around old plants, they tried that at Chernobyl. I think they recently had to go back and put another couple of layers around it. Also, rainwater started to leak in and gather at the bottom of the containment area, which means that now you have liquid radwaste sloshing around a giant room, and you can't send anyone in to clean it up because they will die of rad exposure within an hour. I don't know of any fully decomissioned plants, but from what I understand, the entire procedure calls for taking every piece of everything from the plant and burying it in designated waste dumps. They're supposed to take the surface soil away too, to the point where whatever remains is safe enough that a person can lie face down in the dirt for five years and not get cancer.

There is an ecological principle at the bottom of this problem - the carrying capacity of this planet, in terms of human beings. The planet can only sustain a certain maximum number of people, even with the most efficient use of energy possible. If we use our available energy sources more efficiently, we only buy more time - but so long as we keep increasing our numbers, we *will* finally face the music. We *will* reach the point where no source of energy whatsoever would be sustainable. Then, 'back to the stone age' will be an option indeed, an option *forced* on us. First, a huge percentage of us will die, and next, the survivors will be back in the stone age. Perhaps they'll stay there for a very long time because there will be no easily-availabe stores of energy left to fuel a new industrial revolution.

The only answer I can see is that we, first of all, stop our population growth - and then, reverse it. I believe humanity CAN do this voluntarily. Next we also have to devise the most efficient way possible to use the energy resources available to us, to supply what people need. We need to figure out what people really need, as well!