Thread: Nuclear power plants

Is the use of Electricity the real evil?

To generate electricity on a large scale, look at the disruption to the environment.
Water backed up from dams must flood valleys.
Coal must be burnt to produce steam and the CO2 pollution is immediate.
Internal combustion engines powering generators run on fuel drawn from a finite resource and produce CO2 pollution.
Nuclear fuel used while generating electricity, when spent remains the most toxic substance to life on earth.

Before electricity became available to the general population, look at the life style that people lived.

There was no worries from Nuclear poisoning ( except Marie Curie, did she die not from old age but prematurely from radiation poisoning ??? aged 67 ).

No global warming ??? hadn't the last ice age finished tens of thousand years ago and if the graph of the rate of world ice melt was started then, the graph is just following a bell curve?
The curve peak may not be far off, then it should follow back towards the next ice age and that would be tens of thousands away as the bell curve is played out.

To reverse the melt and start forming ice in the glaciers and ice caps there needs to be two events happen simultaneously, a huge increase in evaporation from the seas and sudden decrease in the worlds ambient air temperature. Wind, snow and rain ?

Was there no mutations causing gross deformities in births of mammals in the past?
Doctors of the time used to keep items of interest on their surgery room mantelpiece and often had a pickle jar with a deformed foetus immersed in formaldehyde.

Ref; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickled_punks

Ref; Carnival sideshow freaks from 19th century New York | Mail Online

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Originally Posted by jx2mad

How did I start this can of worms?

The pen is mightier than the sword.

And the computer is quicker than the pen.
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As long as no one come with the idea of nuclear plants in Tasmania and the the proverbial wins keep coming for southwest I do not worry much about it.
Talking about global warming I just wonder by how much have increased the pollutions since the Chinese stopped using the "pedal power" and start using cars?

Actually that is a great idea chucaro putting several nuke plants in Tassie. A stable state(both people and geo) with plenty of water to cool the nuke plants, there is already a cable to send the power to the mainland and it would provide more employment. As for the waste, Queenstowns's open cut could be a good place as it already looks like a environmental "what not to do" video. For those not familiar do a google image search . Basically your driving through beautiful Tassie forest then you go around a corner a few k's out of town and its rocks with a few weeds and scrawny shrubs hanging on for life. Back when the first copper smelter was there in the early 1900's they did not bother with coal and just burnt any tree or bush they could grab. This allowed most of the topsoil to wash away leaving nothing for plants to grow in, combine that with the acid rain from the smelters and it killed everything. We where there about 16 years ago and the creek was flowing fast but was so thick with mud you could almost walk on it. The copper mine has gone underground but the big hole from the almost century of open cut mining is still there with plenty of water to cool say old nuke rods etc.
Queenstown, Tasmania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Flipper

... and for the next few thousand years people have to worry about the so called spent fuel rods which require constant cooling.

Spent fuel rods need cooling for maybe ~10 - 20 years, sometimes less. It depends how depleted they have become while in service and their length of service.

What you do after pond cooling is still problematic but saying you need constant cooling for thousands of years is off the mark.

Why does Japan have so many nuke plants?

Cause they signed the koyoto protocol and couldn't build coal plants.

Electricity is turning 1 form of energy into another (electrical)
All forms of energy have side affects.

What's worse, coal plant with co2 or nuke plant with waste?
Both stay around for a long long time.

Originally Posted by frantic

Actually that is a great idea chucaro putting several nuke plants in Tassie. A stable state(both people and geo) with plenty of water to cool the nuke plants, there is already a cable to send the power to the mainland and it would provide more employment. As for the waste, Queenstowns's open cut could be a good place as it already looks like a environmental "what not to do" video. ........................

We do not need nature vandalism here in Tasmania and regarding Queenstown the tree regeneration is well under way.
Mother nature is so powerful that soon or later it reclaim the land that humans have taken for granted.
We have good power generation resources and we keep installing more win farms.
Keep the vandals on the other side of the pond please
If the people in the main land want power let them use what it is capable for generate the territory over there.
Perhaps domestic win generators and solar panels will be part of the solution over there combined with Aladdin lamps.
Here is an idea for making a domestic win vane

Originally Posted by Chucaro

We do not need nature vandalism here in Tasmania and regarding Queenstown the tree regeneration is well under way.
Mother nature is so powerful that soon or later it reclaim the land that humans have taken for granted.
We have good power generation resources and we keep installing more win farms.
Keep the vandals on the other side of the pond please
If the people in the main land want power let them use what it is capable for generate the territory over there.
Perhaps domestic win generators and solar panels will be part of the solution over there combined with Aladdin lamps.
Here is an idea for making a domestic win vane

Domestic wind generators are fine for remote rural properties, or even low density hobby farms, but not so suitable in built up environments because of inherent noise generation. Especially in the case of that home built jobbie with straight cut gears and bent sheet steel blades.