Hoping for Good Gas News....

Thanks for bringing this up, but it is only accurate in areas where electricity has been deregulated and the end consumer gets to pick their provider.

This is a point I tried to make earlier; people don't want to pay the freight for the "Green" versions of anything, yet the still reserve the right to bitch & moan.

The technology exists to make every "dirty" power generating facility a lot more clean, not perfect, but much better. However, the cost is HUGE. If the operators of the plant are not allowed to pass these retrofit costs on to the end consumers, they just aren't going to make them. As energy deregulation spreads across the country this problem is just going to get worse as everyone scrambles to buy the "cheapest", vice the cleanest.

I'm not a candidate for MENSA and from what you have contributed to this thread I can see you aren't either.

On Thu, 18 May 2006 23:30:17 -0400, "Michael Johnson, PE" puked:

Don't forget nuclear...

-- lab~rat >:-) Do you want polite or do you want sincere?

Don't forget nuclear waste.

On Mon, 22 May 2006 08:34:29 -0400, Zombywoof puked:

True, but it IS clean nonetheless. And there are ways to dispose of nuclear waste that haven't been exploited. I wonder if there are any recycling potentials there...

-- lab~rat >:-) Do you want polite or do you want sincere?

That would be the U.S. Department of Energy?s Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI). However, all it does is change the waste from one form to another to make the amount required to store smaller.

The Advanced Recycle Facility (ARF) would remove uranium and plutonium from spent fuel along with the long-lived reactor wastes, such as americium and neptunium, which take thousands of years to decay, and recycle them into new fuel.

Burning the recycled fuel to make electricity destroys the long-lived wastes. With that gone, only the short-lived wastes will need to be stored in a repository. The total amount of waste in the repository is reduced and in less than 1,000 years, the short-lived wastes decay until they are safer than the natural ore the original fuel came from.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, civilian nuclear reactors have produced more than 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel, about enough to cover one football field four yards deep. By 2010, DOE expects this figure to exceed 60,000 metric tons.

Even if the recycling does prove effective and the nuclear waste stream is reduced in size by half, that is still and awful lot of really nasty ass s*it out there for at least 1,000 years.

Perhaps we can turn the moon into a nuclear landfill.

You know, maybe I am warped on this but, I expected the volume to be much greater than this for all civilian nuclear facilities. I wonder what the equivalent volume of coal or petroleum would be to produce the same amount of electricity as the nuclear material that made the waste.

I would have expected to have your expectations as well. I was more then a tad surprised. It has always been presented as a really BIG problem by those in the anti-nuke camp.

If that is all the waste ever generated by ALL civilian nuclear power plants then I say lets fire up more of these puppies. I don't see where storing that amount of waste underground is that big of an issue. The tectonic plates don't move so fast that it is a concern, IMHO. I would rather spend the money here than ship it by the tanker load to the Middle East to fund their next wave of attacks. Thanks for the good information. BTW, is that 40k-mt figure just for the USA?

You mean other than military ordnance? Depleted uranium has its uses.

Richard

I would suspect just the US as the report is from the U.S. Department of Energy regarding civilian reactors. Who knows how much stuff military reactors have cranked out. I also bet the Soviets played it little fast & loose with that stuff as well.

The one by me

On Tue, 23 May 2006 20:38:33 -0400, Zombywoof puked:

Plus, carbon based energy leaves perhaps a larger volume of waste that, depending on your view of greenhouse effect, could last longer than 1000 years and isn't contained...

-- lab~rat >:-) Do you want polite or do you want sincere?

On Wed, 24 May 2006 04:15:43 GMT, "Richard" puked:

I, for one, have no problem with nuclear power. I think it's a good answer while we explore other avenues. Hell, I wouldn't mind having a nuclear powered car!

-- lab~rat >:-) Do you want polite or do you want sincere?

The start-up lag is a real bitch.

That's not even close, that is just the actual spent fuel rods, not all the tons of contaminated other parts, pieces, pipes, vessels, & thousands of gallons of contaminated liquids...

I guess the old saying still holds, "There's no such thing as a free lunch" but there is a lot of waste byproducts from coal and petroleum fired plants. The ones with the least impacts might be natural gas but they are the most expensive to operate.

Absolutely, but it is imperative on all of us to see that we aren't killing the whole heard just to eat one animal. :-) With the impending demise of hydro power, wind and solar sure do seem a lot more planet friendly than the current remaining options...

I think one very promising method is using tidal activity. Just think of the amount of energy it takes to raise and lower sea levels globally everyday by several feet. If we can tap into that energy in a meaningful way it would be a huge resource.

Hey, if ya think that is something imagine harnessing the energy of PMSing women. Talk about rising with the tide.