[Gllug] [OT] Technobabble

[Nix]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2005, paul at thinksolution.net spake:
> The whole thing is designed to make you see the Neo-nuclear point of view
> the electricity industry is actively promoting a return to nuclear energy

Everybody with a functioning brain who wants the lights to stay on is
actively promoting a return to nuclear energy. Other techniques don't
scale, or rely on very limited nonrenewable resources, or are more
environmentally damaging, or much more costly, or they can't generate
power on demand and thus run far below capacity much of the time, or,
often, all of those at once.

- Solar: doesn't scale, making the panels is very environmentally
damaging, they don't last long, clearing enough land to generate much
power is environmentally damaging, they cost a lot, and can't generate
power on demand.

- Coal, oil: doesn't scale, environmentally damaging, relies on
nonrenewable resources. (Plus oil is so terribly useful for other things
that it's a damn crime to burn it.)

- Hydro: making them is environmentally damaging (both the flooding and
concurrent habitat destruction, and the rotting vegetation in the newly
formed lakes), they don't scale, they cost a lot.

- Wave: you have a choice of making things that get smashed to flinders in
storms (-> costs a lot and is out of action much of the time), or of
making things that withstand storms but hardly generate any power *unless*
there's a storm. Plus if they were deployed in any quantity they'd be
environmentally damaging because of the habitat covered.

- Wind: doesn't scale, quite costly, can't generate power on
demand. Plus getting planning permission is hellish because everybody
NIMBYs against them almost as hard as they do against the local nuke
plant and the military force rejection of a *very* large proportion
because they interfere with radar something chronic. Wind-out-at-sea
eliminates the NIMBY problem but the other ones are still there, you
annoy seabirds, and storms can smash them.

- Nuclear fission: a nasty, but comparatively small-scale, waste
disposal problem; fairly nasty fuel, very nasty waste products,
decommissioning very hard because the reactor housing is rendered
radioactive by neutron bombardment. Many varieties also have severe side
effects on failure and a large capital cost, but not all; some modern
nuclear reactor designs are ridiculously safe (as in, break the reactor
chamber open and fly a jet aircraft into it and there is *still* no
radiation hazard) but few have been built because of the bad rep nuclear
power got in the gung-ho days of the 50s to 70s when (much) less safe
designs were used. Chernobyl-style events are quite difficult in any
case unless you're a bloody idiot (as the Chernobyl Unit 4 people were;
the decision of the people at TMI-2 to vent radioactive products
directly to the atmosphere was also something that nobody would do today
because they'd be crucified if they did).

Even if a really unsafe design is used it's environmentally friendly;
nature doesn't care about a bit of radiation (or a lot!) and a nice big
contaminated area can go back to nature in a *big* way (look at the
wildlife haven around Chernobyl now).

- Nuclear fusion: not here yet, expensive even when it gets here; fuel
more plentiful than for fission, but fusion of deuterium or tritium
evolves slow neutrons and leads to a radioactive containment vessel
again (as you can't capture the neutrons in a magnetic bottle). Fusion
of boron may be better in that respect, but yields less power per unit
mass. (Fusing ordinary hydrogen is right out: the stuff fuses so slowly
that unless we want our power plants to be the size of stars or to
operate at billions of C it's best to use something else). Catastrophic
failure modes probably less catastrophic than failure modes of fission
reactors, on the basis that irradiation is probably nicer than
irradiation *and* heavy metal poisoning.

All power generation methods suck, but I'd like the lights to stay on
for the long term, and the only thing which can do that is nuclear
power.  (Orbital solar power could do it too, but has insane capital
costs even with self-reproducing construction machinery, and we still
have to figure out how to get the power down to earth without roasting
passing birds.)

-- 
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