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I submit that we do not live in the "Information Age' or the 'Knowlege Economy;' but instead in the Energy Age; energy production and consumption technologies form the foundation of our economy, and access to (and dependance on) energy defines the levels of civilization across the globe. Nuclear power, be it fission or eternally 'just 20 years away' fusion, is simutaneously attractive and dangerous because of the energy density of the fuel. Britain, France and Japan have had enormous success with their power reactor programs, mainly because they use breeder reactors that produce fuel as they run, and can reprocess fuel to largly eliminate the high-level waste stream. I think everyone here can see and agree that any real approach to long-term energy independance will need a nuclear component. (that leaves out the whole 'political wil'l issue. . .) Nuclear power has gotten a bad rap all over the world because of some poor decisions by a few sets of people running a few early-design reactors. Reactors are designed to be safe. . . and as we learn more about the physics, we can design safer reactors. what is harder to do is train the panic reaction out of the operators-- in many cases (chernobyl, TMI) what would have been a costly and embarrassing outage was turned into a disaster though human over-intervention. think about the early application of steam to railroading. Plenty of dumb ' Aw, $#!+' moments there, too. We tend to hear about the oopses; big events make spashy headlines and sell newspapers, but good judgement is expected, common, and thus rarely reported. In the nuclear industry, as in the rail industry (and most others, too) the vast majority of bad (or good!) event outcomes can be laid to the feet of some human-- at some point in the chain of planning, design, adherence to design intent, diligence in maintenence or just plain judgement once the 'event' starts-- the decisions we make determine if we go home unsung heroes or to the grave as reviled goats. People fear what they don't understand, and nuclear physics is not an intuitive subject. There is HUGE quanitities of wrong and willfully misleading information available, and as in any case where emotions run high, the facts get lost in the noise. (as an example of how wrong and misleading things can get around nuclear power; I once had a conversation with an otherwise rational and well-informed freind who was convinced that the electric current in her wall sockets would release radioactivity into her house if her power company used a reactor to supply power to the grid. Convincing her otherwise was an exercise in patience and high-school physics.) Helium-cooled pebble-bed (Gen IV) reactors have considerable potential for the safe and rapid expansion of fission as a primary energy source.They can be used as an industrial heat-source or as a supply of rotating shaft mechanical work using the hot-section technologies of aircraft engines. If the coolant disappears, they stop. no fuss, no melting, no drama. And helium is unique because it 's chemically inert, doesn't capture neutrons, and doesn't form a radio-isotope. In short, an ideal reactor coolant. A standardized design helium-cooled reactor could be placed pretty much anywhere a modern boiler set can be built-- cogenerarion, distributed peaker plants, industrial process heat. you'd trade having to build emissions -control equipment for a few lifts of concrete as neutron shielding in the physical construction of the equipment, but that's pretty much it. The NIMBY politics would be much worse, of course, but with patience, time and education, we might be able to changeTHAT. Personally: Given the Hobsons' Choice of having a natural-gas fueled aeroderivitive turbine (about as clean and efficient as combustion technologies get) or a GenIV Fission reactor for a neighbor, I'd take the Nuke. BUT: I have heard estimates that even at current rates of use/loss, it is likely that usable reserves of helium will run out before proven reserves of liquid hydrocarbon. Sobering. But again, the current (Gen II+ and Gen III) breeder reactors have an enviable safety record, and their users have not turned out to be bad global citizens (on a relative scale <G>) with either waste or 'loose nukes' However: I have heard estimates that total world proven reserves of uranium (in Joules of extractable thermal energy) are only approximately three times the US reserves of coal. Sobering again. so we turn to the 'renewables.' biomass: workable to a point-- energy agricuture for the economy will compete with food and housing agriculture for land and water resources- water that is suitable for industry, agriculture or drinking is a shrinking resource, too. Add to that: in the industrialized world, farmland is currently mostly a tool for converting fossil hydrocarbon to edible hydrocarbon. we use hydrocarbon as energy to prepare the land and pump irrigation water, as feedstocks to make fertilizers and pesticides, burn more to harvest, process and ship food, use still more feedstocks to flavor, color, package and preserve it, and yet more energy to keep it cool, and finally to prepare it, we consume more fossil energy. . . . even afterwards we use fossil hydrocarbon to power the dishwashers and the garbage trucks to clear away what we don't eat. there's a lot of fossils in that bottle of designer water or bowl of low-calorie microwave popcorn! Solar: sits idle for 75% (or more during periods of bad weather) of total (calender) time. (unsufficient solar flux to generate useful power, even using Gen III GeAs cells) But it's clean, quiet and scalable. Look to solar to be the power of choice for moon colonies or other long-duration space missions. Mirror concentration using alumized mylar is feasable in micro-g out to about the orbit of Jupiter. Solar power might also be a good source of low-grade industrial process heat. Wind: aside from the problem of birds getting chopped up, there are relatively few places with the sort of sustained moderate winds that make good generation candidates. maintainance intensive, prone to damage during storms. The wind farm I pass occasionally has about a 10% total availablity rate. (%turbines x %time) Hydro has been covered by others. Geothermal- good spots are rare, (and usually in remote spots of great beauty and volcanic danger) and the water involved often becomes too mineral laden to be useful and must be discarded or purified, leading to disposal problems. Tidal- See wind, water, plus unknown environmental effects from ocean current disruption and greater saltwater intrusion into inland waterways. Space-based solar - VERY big capital outlay, plus the potential for weaponization of the transmission system. (can be engineered around; might be moot if we build a 'beanstalk', which by the way, would REALLY be a railroad into space. ) I've often wondered, and finally calculated: aside from issues of taste and digestablity, you could run an average human adult on about 2 shot-glasses of diesel fuel a day, from an energy content standpoint. To create and deliver an average meal to the average American consumer's table takes close to a gallon of diesel, total fossil expenditure. Like I said: the Energy Age. Several posters have pointed out that railroads generate a lot of car-mile billing for coal haulage-- i would submit that even in an entirely nuclear-powered future, there would stll be a lot of coal ton-miles to be hauled-- in addition to agriculture, (see above) steelmaking, the chemical (PLASTICS!) industries, the textile(dye) industry and even some medicines require long-chain hydrocarbon as a feed-stock. The US places high in the list of nations with large known reserves of coal, so when the wells DO dry out, we're going to be sitting pretty. . . If we don't burn it all first. Where does that leave railroads? they're fastest mode of transportation that can directly benefit from nuclear power, through the use of existing, tested technology: Pan on Caternary central electric power. Half the infrastructure is in place: the rails and roadbed; and individual routes can be converted with relative ease. (expense is a different issue) I personally favor AC transmission for *motive* power, for a reason that noone else has mentioned: HVDC arcs (50+ volts) don't self-quench- once the ionized path is established, it perpetuates until the charge is fully depleted. think of a jacobs' ladder- the spark forms where the conductors are close, but once established, the arc can travel considerable distances and around objects placed in the way. AC is less of a safety and fire hazard. DC is probably better for long-wire use for reasons others have adequately explained. to add to the issue: 2004 will go down in history as the first year that the US energy importation was #2 in the world-- we might even have been outstripped in total energy consumption. Keep your heads up though-- we still lead on a per-capita basis. <G> Trivia note: 60Hz is about the 'sweet spot' for causing maximum electrical harm to mammillian tissue with minimum current. Oops. I wonder if Tesla and Westinghouse had known, they would have changed things?
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