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 ZergSmasher wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I'm amazed that Japan recovered after over 15000 lives were lost to that reactor going critical.

Oh wait... no one died at Fukushima. It was a tsunami that did all the killing. Fukushima resulted in less than 50 people being injured.

The real casualty was common sense, as everyone started screaming "DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!" over nuclear power.

Exalted for truth. Nuclear power is actually safer than coal power, as far as radiation released into the environment (or so I've heard). Not to mention how much less toxic crap gets belched into the atmosphere from a nuclear plant compared with a coal plant.

Then what is the cause of the "contamination" they're bagging and stacking in those first few photos? And the spotting on the cows?

 Breotan wrote:
Then what is the cause of the "contamination" they're bagging and stacking in those first few photos? And the spotting on the cows?

It's safer in everyday operation. Obviously is the nuclear power plant's management is spectacularly incompetent and allows a disaster like Fukushima to happen the contamination is going to be worse than coal, but if you have to choose which one to live near the nuclear plant is the much safer option.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
For our vast enerygy needs, Wind/Solar would rarely touch it.
Nuclear power is what is really needed for clean energy

Surprisingly, the amount of solar energy cast on to the Earth every day vastly exceeds the amount required by the entire human race. It is merely a question of collecting, storing and distributing it.

True, but solar is still a bit of a pipe dream right now. Yes it's starting to actually get good, but it's still far away from being the primary source of energy

Storing power is difficult, in quantities required for the scale of countries.

Solar is still at risk of variable output due to weather or season.

UK has large systems to store power to boost the grid at extreme sudden demand but that's only x amount of time before its expended and needs to be pumped up to recharge it.

We're on the verge of Seaquest technology.....soon we have huge industrial plants turning carbon monoxide into oxygen in places where the rain forest use to exist...

This looks like something I'd see on Polycount or an environment image dump thread

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Surprisingly, the amount of solar energy cast on to the Earth every day vastly exceeds the amount required by the entire human race. It is merely a question of collecting, storing and distributing it.

And if those "mere" questions were easy to solve the entire engineering profession wouldn't exist. Solar is great in some situations, but even if you add all of the (realistic) theoretical improvements we're working on it's still not a complete solution.

There's a lot of reasons Engineering is a discipline that takes decades to become COMPETENT at. Much less actually master just one of many, many complex aspects.

Solar is an utterly impractical possibility. The vast areas you must cover are well beyond the scale of any energy project yet attempted by the US (for example)... and it has incredible, obvious faults.

1. The sun doesn't always shine.
This is an issue. You cannot just bank up energy in any kind of practical quantity for mass industrial and human use. Likewise, many types of powerplant can't be simply turned on and off the instant night comes to cover that load. They simply must be on.

2. Not everywhere shines equally.
Some areas have weather that makes power generation from solar ineffective, such as frequent clouds or just poorer angle of sunlight. Others that DO have advantageous atmospheric qualities (ie deserts) have other horrible downsides (ie, erosion and maintenance issues, remoteness).

3. Solar Cells pollute anyway to make!
It takes a lot of Hydoflouric Acid to etch a PV. And HF isn't exactly simple dispose of. Now if we're to increase our production of large scale PV Cells by about 2000 times to satisfy national power needs... you have a waste issue that very honestly makes Nuclear byproducts look trivial.

There's dozens of other real issues as to why one cannot simply 'Solar and Wind' our energy consumption needs away. It's an extremely complex set of questions which really all come back to the same point that's the conclusion of multiple independent engineering studies by reputable institutions. The ONLY carbon-neutral energy production mechanism that is not cost-prohibitive and can generate the amounts of energy needed continuously is nuclear fission plants. Many more of them, ideally with a hydrogen fuel distribution economy to reduce the need for fossil fuels in transportation.

 Killionaire wrote:
3. Solar Cells pollute anyway to make!
It takes a lot of Hydoflouric Acid to etch a PV. And HF isn't exactly simple dispose of. Now if we're to increase our production of large scale PV Cells by about 2000 times to satisfy national power needs... you have a waste issue that very honestly makes Nuclear byproducts look trivial.

To be fair, this is only an issue with photovoltaics. PVs are nice for small-scale stuff, but if you're building large power plants anyway solar thermal plants are an option and those don't have the nasty chemical problems.

The ONLY carbon-neutral energy production mechanism that is not cost-prohibitive and can generate the amounts of energy needed continuously is nuclear fission plants.

This is only true if you make the (ridiculous) assumption that all of our energy needs have to be met with a single kind of power plant. Hydroelectric, geothermal, and tidal plants are even better than nuclear (at least from a "clean energy" point of view) as long as you're in a place where building them is possible. Any realistic "green" energy system is going to require nuclear plants to cover the places where it's the only option for geographical reasons, but there's no reason to assume that nuclear needs to meet 100% of our needs.

Well, water power its pretty good. Basically wind that never stops (unless there is are really severe drought, but the same could be said of coal or nuclear, you need water for steam/cooling). And that's a pretty conventional method. Pretty expensive though, considering you have to build a damn.

Wind is not quite as reliable, but far more than solar. Wind is actually very good, but it is a eyesore according to some (I personally quite like them, but maybe I'm just weird), and kills quite a few birds, so you have to take migration patterns into account when figuring out where they go. Although not all areas can get them because of wind currents, the areas that do can expect pretty constant power generation. They'll probably have to be locked down because of too much wind far more often than that there is not enough (to much wind can damage, or even destroy the turbines).

Nuclear is good, but with issues. It definitely needs a lot more invested into it safety-wise. Stuff like what happened in Fukushima should not be able to happen, even if it does get hit by an earthquake. And the company who operates the plant should be liable for any and all damages (although that's probably the case currently, I'm not quite sure). We also really don't have an effective storage place for nuclear waste. There was that mountain we hollowed out, but isn't that still being blocked from being used by the governor of that state?

If we want a lot of clean energy, we need to develop practical fusion power technology. Right now it takes more energy to sustain a fusion reaction than you get out of it, but with a bit more research perhaps...

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If we want a lot of clean energy, we need to develop practical fusion power technology. Right now it takes more energy to sustain a fusion reaction than you get out of it, but with a bit more research perhaps...

Unfortunately it's been "with a bit more research perhaps..." for quite a while now, and each added bit of research doesn't seem to get us any closer to having a practical energy source. We know the physics of it should work and it's "only" an engineering problem of making it work, but we can not afford to gamble on the desperate hope that we'll get the necessary breakthroughs in time. Energy planning must operate on the assumption that fusion is not going to save us.

The problem with Fukushima wasn't that it wasn't built to withstand an earthquake ...

It was - within tolerances. One at a time, it would have been fine.

It wasn't built to handle the one-two-three knockout punch that multiple natural catastrophes hitting it all at once could do.

 chromedog wrote:
It wasn't built to handle the one-two-three knockout punch that multiple natural catastrophes hitting it all at once could do.

But even then it still should have been fine. IIRC there was an opportunity early on to flood the reactors, which would cool them down and prevent the disaster. But it would also allow salt water corrosion to destroy a lot of expensive equipment, so the plant operator decided to deny the extent of the problem and refuse to put morality over profits. If the incident is handled properly we probably end up with a destroyed power plant but minimal, if any, radiation getting out into the surrounding area.

And of course newer reactor designs have better passive safety systems that don't depend on active cooling to avoid a disaster. Fukushima is a strong argument for replacing old reactors with modern ones, but it isn't a very good argument against nuclear power in general.

What happened at Fukishima is that the emergency diesel generators use to provide power to operate the plant when it got hit by an earthquake were flooded by the tsunami.

Obviously solar power is not at the moment in a condition to be able to supply all requirements. I merely wanted to point out that the idea it never could is inherently wrong.

The long term solution to energy will depend on a variety of approaches. Various green technologies such as tidal, solar, geo-thermal and wind are effectively free once installed as well as non-polluting. It doesn't make sense not to develop them.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
What happened at Fukishima is that the emergency diesel generators use to provide power to operate the plant when it got hit by an earthquake were flooded by the tsunami.

Right, the reactors themselves shut down and then the flooding immediately after the tsunami hit destroyed the emergency generators and shut off the last source of power required to run the cooling system. The issue is what happened after that. The reactors didn't immediately go from safe to a puddle of molten radioactive metal, it took time for the heat to build up and components to start to fail. If the reactors had been flooded with sea water (the only available source of enough water) in that window it likely would have kept the temperature within safe levels, at the cost of allowing salt water corrosion to destroy billions of dollars worth of equipment. The plant operator hesitated to accept the financial loss and the reactors weren't flooded until after the point of no return. If they had made the opposite choice then we might be talking about how the biggest effect of Fukushima was an increase in electricity prices in Japan to pay off the cost of a new power plant.

Obviously solar power is not at the moment in a condition to be able to supply all requirements. I merely wanted to point out that the idea it never could is inherently wrong.

It isn't inherently wrong by basic laws of physics, it's just not a viable solution in the foreseeable future for engineering reasons. You can't just look at the total amount of energy that reaches our planet and assume that the amount of available solar power has anything to do with that number. We are never going to be able to exploit more than a tiny, tiny percentage of it, even with massive use of solar power. And we aren't going to be able to exploit anywhere near a large enough percentage of it to meet our energy needs in the foreseeable future. You might as well talk about how it's not inherently wrong that we could just turn dirt into all the energy we need, since e=mc^2 and a handful of dirt is equivalent to a really huge amount of energy.

The way I am reading your comments, you seem to think there is no point developing green power because it can never amount to anything.

My view is that green power is already starting to make a significant impact in several countries and can be developed into a mixed energy system that will reduce the amount of nuclear to that needed to provide a safety baseline.

The exact technologies will differ according to local resources. For example, Spain has a lot of solar. The UK has the chance of making a lot out of wind and tidal power. Countries like Japan and Iceland can do a lot with geo-thermal.

As for foreseeable future needs, energy consumption in the UK, France and Germany has been declining for some years, due to factors such as more efficient technology (low energy bulbs).

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The way I am reading your comments, you seem to think there is no point developing green power because it can never amount to anything.

You're reading it completely wrong. Of course there's a point in developing "green" power sources. Hydroelectric, geothermal, and tidal power are good options in areas where the geography allows them. They provide large amounts of consistent power without worrying about weather, peak loads, etc. Solar (preferably solar thermal, not photovoltaics) and wind power are worth developing but we really need to be realistic about how useful they are. They suffer from weather issues and inconsistent output, so it's very difficult to use them as a primary energy source. For example, what do you do if there's a poorly-timed cloudy day when your grid is experiencing peak loads? You're completely screwed if you only have solar power available because it is simply unacceptable to say "oops, we have to shut your electricity off today". So you have to have other, more reliable, sources available as a backup, and those sources have to be capable of handling the entire expected load without any help from your wind/solar plants. And nuclear is the only option (besides burning fossil fuels) that doesn't require specific geographical conditions.

Let's consider a small-scale example: a typical household with some solar panels on the roof. A quick google search gives us about 10-20kW of power as a rough estimate of a peak load. So let's assume our example household really invests in solar, to the point that they can meet their entire demand (with batteries to store energy at off-peak times) on a sunny day. But sunny days aren't guaranteed, so we still need to connect the house to the same grid as everyone else. Now what happens when it's a cloudy day but our example family doesn't cut their consumption? That 10-20kW is drawn from the grid. That's fine if there's a nuclear power plant providing enough extra kW to give them their 10-20, but if the extra capacity isn't available then the grid is overloaded and bad things start to happen. And here's the problem: power plants can't scale up their output instantly. That 10-20kW needs to be built into the plant's normal output, just in case it is needed. So even though our house has its own solar panels we have to build pretty much the same "conventional" power plant as if the solar panels weren't there.

Now scale this up to a full-size solar plant powering a whole city. Now instead of 10-20kW from one home you've got orders of magnitude more power to replace on a cloudy day. And that power has to come from somewhere. It's not as bad as literally building a nuclear plant next to the solar plant since everything is connected and someone probably has extra power to sell us (peak use times don't all overlap). But to cover the potential shortages from solar you have to duplicate a significant part of your total solar output in other sources. And that makes solar power a useful supplement to other sources, not a suitable replacement for nuclear power (or fossil fuels, if you don't like nuclear).