Is Nuclear Energy Good or Bad?
- Thread starter Biohazard
- Start date
Good.
Cleaner overall than petro. The number of nuclear accidents versus the number of oil spills, pipeline ruptures, H2S knockdowns, increases in cancer, asthma, etc., make it highly preferable.
just, don't tell mainstream society that until I've cashed in my shares in various petro companies, k?
Cleaner overall than petro. The number of nuclear accidents versus the number of oil spills, pipeline ruptures, H2S knockdowns, increases in cancer, asthma, etc., make it highly preferable.
just, don't tell mainstream society that until I've cashed in my shares in various petro companies, k?
Good, I just haven't decided if the ones they use on subs would be better (more needed but smaller in size) than 1 great big one.
Karrie, with Exxon posting a $10.9B profit on just the 1st quarter you might want to hold onto a few of those shares, unless you know something we don't...................
Karrie, with Exxon posting a $10.9B profit on just the 1st quarter you might want to hold onto a few of those shares, unless you know something we don't...................
Bad, when compared to other source like solar and geothermal.
Nuclear power plants require a huge investment in terms of construction and mining developement and produce waste that is toxic for thousands of years. They also consume large amounts of water needed for cooling and steam generation.
It makes far more sense to find decentralized and low impact solutions to our energy needs than more extensive developments like nuclear.
Nuclear power plants require a huge investment in terms of construction and mining developement and produce waste that is toxic for thousands of years. They also consume large amounts of water needed for cooling and steam generation.
It makes far more sense to find decentralized and low impact solutions to our energy needs than more extensive developments like nuclear.
Good in the short term, solar is no good for your lights at night unless you store the energy in batteries but then what to d with the batteries after they are no longer any good. Geothermal, while promising is still in it's infancy.
Nukes are clean and despite an enviromental smear campaign, cheap to built while being more and more efficiant using up almost all it's fuel. In Europe they bury the spent fuel rods in glass containers a few meters below the earth, hardly sounds deadly to me.
Nukes are clean and despite an enviromental smear campaign, cheap to built while being more and more efficiant using up almost all it's fuel. In Europe they bury the spent fuel rods in glass containers a few meters below the earth, hardly sounds deadly to me.
Nuclear is a short term solution, for one thing it relies on limited uranium supplies. And waste storage is problematic, we don't need to think just in terms of a few centuries we need to think in 10s of thousands of years. Imagine our far decendents digging into a nuclear waste storage dump they had no idea even existed.
Constructing a nuclear power facility with the neccessary security, containment, generation and transmission capabilities is hardly cheap. Building low energy requirement homes, buildings and appliances makes much more sense than continually increasing our energy demands. Many homes in Japan have used passive solar for heating water for years with only small electical units for cloudy days. Improvements are constantly being made in active solar collection and storage and with further investment and production the cost would become much more affordable.
With more investment geothermal also offers low impact and nearly endless energy, new drilling technology now allows us to access sources of energy only previously available in places like Iceland.
Nuclear represents an older approach to energy production and use that I think will be replaced by a more distributed energy model. All new residential and commercial construction should include passive and active solar systems, we're wasting huge square footage of collection space.
Constructing a nuclear power facility with the neccessary security, containment, generation and transmission capabilities is hardly cheap. Building low energy requirement homes, buildings and appliances makes much more sense than continually increasing our energy demands. Many homes in Japan have used passive solar for heating water for years with only small electical units for cloudy days. Improvements are constantly being made in active solar collection and storage and with further investment and production the cost would become much more affordable.
With more investment geothermal also offers low impact and nearly endless energy, new drilling technology now allows us to access sources of energy only previously available in places like Iceland.
Nuclear represents an older approach to energy production and use that I think will be replaced by a more distributed energy model. All new residential and commercial construction should include passive and active solar systems, we're wasting huge square footage of collection space.
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Nucs are better than many alternatives
Nucs are good!
In Alberta we have little or no hils for water falls. 80% of our drinking water is under ground in aquifers which are being punctured by zillions of holes by exploration and drilling.
We have no rivers to effectivly dam to get hydro. Intrinsic to prairies there is no place to allow the water to "drop"
The tar sands are using fresh water for steam injections. More water is used there than is used in the City of Edmonton.
We are loosing our water at a rate beyond imiagination.
Enter Nucs:
They are clean by comparison to oil and coal and use less water if designed to do so.
The downside is they are more expensive to build. It can be a good thing depending on how many years the utility company wants to recover the investment and what kind of returns they want. Alberta will force the price of electricity up in the province to make Nuc power possible. Other companies in the genration buisiness will see record profits and the people of Alberta will be living in the dark.
Point here is you can not have one rate for Nuc power any more than you can have 1 rate for wind power.
Alberta exploits the population to finance these things.
Nucs are good!
In Alberta we have little or no hils for water falls. 80% of our drinking water is under ground in aquifers which are being punctured by zillions of holes by exploration and drilling.
We have no rivers to effectivly dam to get hydro. Intrinsic to prairies there is no place to allow the water to "drop"
The tar sands are using fresh water for steam injections. More water is used there than is used in the City of Edmonton.
We are loosing our water at a rate beyond imiagination.
Enter Nucs:
They are clean by comparison to oil and coal and use less water if designed to do so.
The downside is they are more expensive to build. It can be a good thing depending on how many years the utility company wants to recover the investment and what kind of returns they want. Alberta will force the price of electricity up in the province to make Nuc power possible. Other companies in the genration buisiness will see record profits and the people of Alberta will be living in the dark.
Point here is you can not have one rate for Nuc power any more than you can have 1 rate for wind power.
Alberta exploits the population to finance these things.
nuclear power is good. Nuclear fission (what we currently use), is great but has the drawback that it results in nuclear waste.
nuclear fusion, which is not impossible and is in the early stages of industrialisation, is completely clean and very very efficient indeed.
nuclear fusion, which is not impossible and is in the early stages of industrialisation, is completely clean and very very efficient indeed.
We already have a huge fusion reactor in constant operation 93 million miles away, the only real challenge we have when it comes to energy is finding more efficient ways to collect, distribute and store solar radiation.
Solar radiation can be turned directly into electricity, it can be used to heat water and homes and with light pipe systems can provide natural lighting.
Why go back to energy sources that require a huge impact on the environment in terms of mining, construction, transmission and waste disposal?
Nuclear power also adds more heat to the environment, not a good thing with current conditions.
Solar radiation can be turned directly into electricity, it can be used to heat water and homes and with light pipe systems can provide natural lighting.
Why go back to energy sources that require a huge impact on the environment in terms of mining, construction, transmission and waste disposal?
Nuclear power also adds more heat to the environment, not a good thing with current conditions.
Actually, you needn't worry about that, it doesn't really matter. Whatever energy source we use, it all ends up as heat in the environment eventually. Here's part of the fix: nuclear plants by the seashore, dissociating water into hydrogen and oxygen and producing electricity, release the oxygen, collect the hydrogen, put it into the existing natural gas pipeline system for distribution and use it for space heating and transportation fuel, burning it just recombines it with oxygen to make water again... A few little engineering problems to overcome first, but the basic science is well understood. Here's another part of the fix: contraception, worldwide, maximum two-child families. The root of all our environmental and energy issues is really that there are simply too many of us, by a factor of about ten. Humanity in its current numbers is a plague upon the planet, and nature has unpleasant (to us and our values at least) ways of dealing with such things.
This is mostly for a project. Do you think nuclear energy is good or bad? Why?
Any help is appreciated
The irony of someone named Biohazard asking this question is hysterical - well done.
What, pray tell, is your "project?" :lol:
That argument always loses something on me given that the people using up the most resources and causing the most pollution are societies which are currently reproducing at a rate below replacement.
Why is it that the poorest nations have the highest birthrates- is it because contrception is'nt acceptable in some of these places? (Catholics, Muslims)
Dexter: Wouldn't there be problems with having Hydrogen coursing through Existing Gas Lines due to permeability(leakage)
Lester
Dexter: Wouldn't there be problems with having Hydrogen coursing through Existing Gas Lines due to permeability(leakage)
Lester
There's about 90,000 Terawatts of available energy from the sun, human needs are about 15 Terawatts. Any sane long term solution to energy consumption is going to use as readily an available low impact source as possible. It doesn't matter where you put a nuclear power plant, it's still going to pose a threat to the environment from accidental release of radioactive material and waste and create habitat destruction through mining and construction.
It's not the human numbers that are the problem it's our combined ecological footprint and there are many ways to reduce that. Both China and India have tried forced population control programs that have created serious social problem. The evidence seems to indicate that when standards of life are raised the size of families goes down naturally, instead of treating people like a plague we need to be concerned with raising quality of life for everyone.
And using solar power doesn't create a net increase in energy for the Earth, it uses energy already here.
I tend to agree with Dexter in that there are just too damn many of us. Unfortunately, the problem will get worse before it gets better. The topic question:"Is nuclear energy good or bad?" Energy is energy. Used wisely, nuclear energy could solve some of our problems, and give us a few other problems related to nuclear waste and waste heat. North Americans are, on a per capita basis, the biggest consumers of just about everything. Other countries, notably China and India, aspire to have what we have..........With about six or seven times our population. The problems of energy and population have to be addressed on a world level....And soon.
Haha I realized the same thing after I posted. It's a project for Canadian Geography, we just finished the energy section and had to do a presentation. Part of the project is getting answers for if people think nuclear energy is good or bad.
Another thanks goes out to all who helped too.
Yep, that's one of those "little engineering problems." The hydrogen molecule is so small it leaks through pretty much everything.