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Is it too late?

Nothing is simple. But politicians saying that we need a mixture of power generation, including nuclear, is simple. And generally sound bite simple. Switch off brain. Spout cliché. That doesn't mean nuclear power couldn't be discussed sensibly. It just rarely is.
Apart from the radioactive waste the big problem with nuclear is it takes 25 years to build power station. :eek: you can build loads of wind, solar, hydro, tidal etc in that time.
 
Somehow I find it hard to accept the nuclear option. When all the establishment are in favour you have to question. We have 24 hour tides all around our shores. Harness that energy and you won't need a nuclear industry which can't deal with its hazardous waste and which is linked with nuclear arms. It's also a technology which we specifically don't want used in certain parts of the world.

Greenpeace don't like hydroelectric options btw. I guess they feel that they disrupt local ecosystems.
 
Somehow I find it hard to accept the nuclear option. When all the establishment are in favour you have to question. We have 24 hour tides all around our shores. Harness that energy and you won't need a nuclear industry which can't deal with its hazardous waste and which is linked with nuclear arms. It's also a technology which we specifically don't want used in certain parts of the world.

Tidal energy has proven really hard to develop... I'm not up to date mind you, but it's problems like extreme variation in wave height, extremely hostile environment (seawater), high relative cost. With the most established technology, barrages, you're also basically building a dam filled with whirling blades across a major body of water. The ecosystem disruption is pretty much inevitable, and consequences hard to predict.
 

Greenpeace don't like hydroelectric options btw. I guess they feel that they disrupt local ecosystems.
Patrick Moore has long been pro nuclear. He no longer has anything to with Greenpeace, hasn't for yonks, but the link is always mentioned when the topic of nuclear power rears it ugly head.
Greenpeace's opinion, or George Monbiot's, is not the final word on the matter anyway. Even he only resorts to the nuclear option because he sees it as a stopgap, to be replaced in time with something more renewably sustainable. Trouble is that more nuclear will just lead to more nuclear.
 
If you look up Patrick Moore on Wikipedia you will see that his association with Greenpeace ended in 1986, 36 years ago. He has since championed nuclear power and GM foods, excused unsustainable logging and denied Global Warming. In short he's a complete twat.
 
I thought there was a legitimate Green argument for nuclear power? I think Friends Of The Earth were pro-NP at some point?

I'm pretty sure FoE were never pro-nuclear but about 10 years they moved from basing their opposition from H&S to the fact that nuclear has such an unbelieveably shit record that it wasn't credible. At least part of that shift was due to the massive evidence that had slowly piled up about the unhealthiness of burning fossil fuels and how many deaths globally were due to them. In comparison nuclear is great.
 
Well there’s that climate change thing..

Nuclear power is really crap in terms of climate change. The largest source of GHG emissions from nuclear is the milling and mining of the uranium - i.e it is ongoing. It is a "low carbon" source of energy not a no-carbon one - although no one has a meaningful definition of "low carbon" and arguably nuclear is is a higher emitter than highly efficient gas. And this is before we get on to its actual delivery record which is appalling.

It's a comfort blanket for anyone who really really wants to believe that everything is going to be ok amd nothing much needs to change.
 
Do you have anything credible on nuclear being a higher emitter than gas?

It's a disputed claim of course, why I called it "arguably" lower. There are so many claims being made by massively vested interests on all sides and there's big money at stake & there's a shit ton of bad (or at least partial) science being published to back it all up. The key takeaway for me is that nuclear is absolutely not zero carbon and is no where near it although imo it is probably down somewhere in the gray zone between trad fossil fuels and renewables. But gas is fundamentally quite efficient, whereas centralised electricity production in massive plants fundamentally isn't - there are huge distribution losses.

The GHG cost of nuclear is very hard to calculate - how to spread the carbon cost of a Fukushima? How do you even calculate the GHG cost of a Fukushima? What about future storage facilities? Even the milling and mining figure is almost completely dependent on how many other active nuclear plants there are globally and what capacity they are running at - this will determine what richness-level of uranium ore it is worth mining. Anything down to 0.02% is worthwhile in terms of EROEI but obviously the closer you get to that figure, the higher the GHG load, particularly in the milling - you are looking at grinding a fairly small amount out of a tonne of rock, all that is done with fossil fuels.
 
No , not zero carbon. My readings put it at possibly somewhere between solar and wind.
Agree about the vested interests and cherry picking of figures, comparing apples and oranges etc.
 
No , not zero carbon. My readings put it at possibly somewhere between solar and wind.
Agree about the vested interests and cherry picking of figures, comparing apples and oranges etc.
Ha ha literally just watching a prog on BBC2 right now about the lost decade 2010-2020 and it's all about Big Oil's attempts to rebrand 'clean gas' as green. So I'm guessing that some of the science I'd have been reading 2012-13 when I was working on this was from these wankers. This is literally exactly the same strategy as that of the nuclear industry now, i.e. desperately trying to make itself look like part of some nebulous "green solution" when it obviously isn't.
 
Have we given up on nuclear fusion?
Cold fusion?

In February, British researchers announced that they had produced and maintained 59 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds in a giant donut-shaped machine called a tokamak.

It hardly produced enough energy to power one house for a day and used more energy than it generated. But, it was a remarkable moment as it proved that nuclear fusion could occur continuously on Earth.

In this donut-shaped machine Lisa, we obey the laws of thermal dynamics.
 
Was that Big Oil v the World? If so it's well worth watching the two episodes prior to that one, which looked at the original burying of their discoveries and then their planting of Cheney, Bush et al in the White House.
Just watched all three b2b - like you say, very much worth watching. Lots of the company big wigs on tape. Also the very depressing reality that the US of A is the worlds leading methane polluter as of now, via fracking.
 
They are talking about 'energy security' (ostensibly because of wars and cold-wars) similar to noises coming from the Tories in the context of them wanting to go for more exploitation of North Sea fossil fuel resources. As massive as the impact of the Gulf of Mexico drilling and extraction proposals would be, they would still represent I think less than 1% of the USA's current production. But it's a real step in the wrong direction, a long-term move, and a failure to recognise where we need to get to fast.

As the article says:

Last summer, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (or IRA), a landmark bill that the president lauded as the “biggest step forward on climate ever”. The sweeping legislation has billions of dollars in support for renewable energy projects and electric car subsidies, but it also included stipulations that large areas of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska be made available for fossil fuel drilling in order to appease Joe Manchin, a pro-coal Democratic senator and key swing vote.

Climate campaigners mostly considered the trade-off to be worthwhile as the resulting emissions cuts should still be large, but the new glut of drilling could wipe out much of the benefits of wind and solar projects over the next decade.

So a 'pro-coal' US Senator had to be pacified. By the way he happens to have his campaigns significantly funded by 'oil and gas' according to this:

 
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