Nuclear Energy = Fool's Gold

There are many arguments in favor of nuclear energy.  None of them holds up to scrutiny. 

"It's carbon neutral."  This is the closest to a true statement but it isn't true.  Tons of oil and coal will be burnt in the extraction, refinement, and transportation of nuclear fuel.  Compared with your average fossil fuel burning power plant it isn't much but I don't think I'm splitting hairs by pointing out that nuclear energy is not carbon neutral.

"It's cheap."  Someone please point to a nuclear plant that hasn't over-run projected costs by billions of dollars or has actually lowered anyone's electric bill.  I'll wait.

"It's safe." or "Technology and design has improved to such a degree that a failure is impossible."  To that I'd like start by saying, "See BP."  All technology has a chance of failure.  This chance is almost always much greater than those designing and building the technology think it is.  The safest cars' accelerator pedals stick, skyscrapers designed to withstand an airplane collision collapse after a collision and an intense fire, deep water drilling rigs claiming to have no chance of an accident explode and kill the Gulf of Mexico, two space shuttles fall to the earth in flames.  Anything made by humans will fail eventually.  And as recent events have shown us when a "low possibility" event occurs in a very complex situation, the result is usually a catastrophe many times greater than any "plausible" worst case scenario accepted before the event. 

The very idea that we believe we can store radioactive waste for over 100,000 years while it decays to a safe state is astonishing.  The same people that built Three Mile Island or Chernobyl are going to build the chambers where we house the waste from nuclear reactors.  We can't even get short term storage right, apparently.  Tritium has been leaking from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant for some time and it will probably end up in the drinking water of New York.  We can't keep very good track of the deadliest poison known to man, plutonium, which has a half life of 24,000 years.  As far as humanity is concerned the life span of plutonium or any other slowly decaying radioactive material is infinite.  We will not be here 100,000 years from now.  Some other form of us or some other creature will have taken our place long before the poison ceases to be deadly.  Cultures and societies will rise and fall violently and to think we can guard this horrendous danger against those future persons is laughable.  An oil spill, no matter how immense, is finite.  For the human race, the radioactive material we are making today will last beyond forever.

Energy Independence - A Daily Show History of Empty Rhetoric

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Gulf Coast Oil Spill and Our Old Friends Halliburton

See this full set of pictures here.

When obtaining the license to build this enormous oil well that reached over a mile down into the water to drill, baby drill, BP said the chances of an explosion or catastrophic accident was next to zero.  Aren't these same people making the same claims about nuclear power plants?

Oh, and a little tidbit about this that brings a nostalgic image of the evil Dick Cheney to the mind's eye:  Haliburton was the company that did the cementing, a process of injecting cement to line the well cap and the walls of the well to contain the highly explosive gases.  Haliburton's cementing is also implicated as the cause of the gigantic Timor oil well blowout last year.


cross posted to the mopod blog

Nuclear Energy: Safe, Clean, Cheap ...?

I have three problems with nuclear energy:

1. Waste. This will be incredibly deadly for a period of time longer than the human race's existence. The very idea of burying our nuclear waste and thereby keeping it safe from the curiosity of future humans... or other future life form... or geology... is ludicrous.

2. Safety. Nuclear power plants are designed by, engineered by, built by, regulated by, and operated by humans. Therefore the possiblity of failure is possible at all levels. As Chernobyl proved, failure can be deadly or worse and for a very long time.

3. Expense. Even if we don't include the increasing cost and danger of stored waste (which is monstrous and exponentially increasing with time), even if we don't do that, nuclear power is phenomenally expensive. Add the incredible amount of energy used and environmental destruction wreaked just to create the fuel with the incredible expense of creating this incredibly complex machine and the unmeasurable expense of accidents and waste leaks and it equals "more expensive than is affordable."

It all boils down to not liking it. Burning coal is very bad in the short term, but at our present useage we will run out of coal long before our nuclear fuel will no longer be deadly. For that matter we will probably run out of all combustible materials on this planet before our nuclear waste is no longer toxic.

We must find a way to use the massive forces around us that we can tap as wind, hydro, and tide. We also must constrain the human population as we're pressing the planet to its limits right now, imagine it in 500 years! Everything boils down to too many humans and too small a planet for all of them.

Nanotech Insulating Paint?

This stuff is very intriguing. They're claiming up to 20% savings though no firm evidence of this.

SFGate - There is, however, a great deal of information about Nansulate's performance based on real-life tests in industrial and residential settings. Factory owners have reported savings of 20 percent or more on their energy costs. Home energy savings of 20 to 40 percent are reported in testimonials on the Industrial Nanotech Web site. Although the foil-and-bubble-wrap insulation conserves some heat, it typically allows too much heat transfer to explain so large of a differential. My educated guess is that the Nansulate is responsible for 60 to 80 percent of the differential.

Here's the Nansulate site.

Solar Tower of Power

This is one of the best solar ideas I've read about as far as large scale energy production is concerned. Termites have been using the natural convection caused by differences in temperature, etc. between the ground and a higher point. This technology could also be used to create "green" skyscrapers and could be incorporated into all kinds of large works. Of course this thing is supposed to be around 1km high so the increased efficiency would be pronounced but using this kind of energy (which could be used directly as mechanical energy, not just to turn generators) to reduce the load on the power grid produced by any large structure seems to make sense.

Oh wait, that's why we won't do it, just like we won't build these generators and we won't invest in wind and tide power. It's not going to make the ultra-wealthy mine owners, oil tycoons, or speculators more ultra wealthy. Since the only resources one of these things takes is in building and maintaining it, it doesn't provide a "revenue stream" that feeds the rich. We'll have none of that in America.