Blech. Everyone competes to come out against Yucca Mountain. John Edwards claims that he has changed his mind about Yucca Mountain based upon the science that has come out since then. Presumably, one of his aides finally got around to explaining nuclear fission.
At least we're out of Iowa, so I haven't heard anyone pledging allegiance to ethanol. Dated: Corn-based ethanol. Rated: Cellulosic biodiesel!
why don't you cover the subsidy schedule of corn-based ethanol?
along with asking why Industrial Hemp is considered a Narcotic(?)
Cellulosic anything...we might need to get around to actually figuring out how to produce the stuff first. (And how do you get cellulosic biodiesel? Or are you just making a funny?)
Although a greenie, I'm also one of those that is suspicious about any of the ethanol/biodiesel/whatever productions, given that a) usually we're doing it half-assed and backwardly (ethanol from corn? Give me a break.), and subsidizing it up the wazoo, and are NOT using it as we should, which is only as a stopgap until we get something better--cellulosic ethanol from sweetgrass and similar, algae-based production, etc, etc. and so forth. Though from an energy-efficiency point and given the material we're starting with, I'd almost rather we went back to the Stanley Steamer--with all the conversions necessary, I wonder if there's ever any possibility that (fuel cell/biodiesel/ethanol) can ever be as efficient as a simple boiler.
Nuclear I prefer, especially with the new pebble-bed reactors that are coming out. Again sticky, but it's going to be some time before we get fusion really ramped up.
I'm fine with closing Yucca before it opens as long as Nevada pays back every dollar the feds have spent in developing it for waste storage.
It is the best place we have to put the stuff and it is irresponsible pandering and against the national interest to reject it now. We need to start building more nuke plants immediately. We will probably need the French to mostly build the first few until we know what we're doing again.
Sorry I missed the debate, could someone explain what (if any) the legitimate opposition to Yucca Mountain is? Having read the Wikipedia page, I see tons of regulatory agencies and scientists saying it's a good site and a good plan, followed by a paragraph or two saying that Nevada residents say NIMBY.
I'd like to not just jump to a conclusion here and paint any opponents as idiots... Could someone enlighten me, are there decent reasoned arguments against it?
Yucca mountain is just a temporary storage site for nuclear waste. The plans for the site do not envision that it will actually be closed for 200 years. Until then, the govt will be able to open the locked doors and roll the containers back out of the mountain. Admitedly, it will be more difficult to do this from inside a mountain instead of from a concrete pad, but they are trying to finesse this, by saying that they have a "solution" to the nuclear waste issue, without actually disposing of the waste itself.
Why, you may ask, are they doing this? Because the "waste" still has an enormous amount of energy left in it, if the country decided to reprocess it, which is what the govt realizes will happen within about a hundres years, when it becomes apparent that it is NOT a good thing to burn carbon to make electricity. Rather, nuclear energy will be seen to be a better way, and the carbon that is left can be turned into fuels for uses that cannot practically use electricity (e.g. airplanes, and likely some cars).
It would be most efficient to just let the waste sit on concrete pads till we make the collective decision to reprocess, but that won't happen till the enviros shutdown the carbon burning and turn the lights out. Then, people will realize what sort of "life" the enviros have in mind for us, and we will start to do energy planning rationally, rather than based on a religion that worships birds and bunnies and rocks.
Before you support any biofuel, please do a quick calculation of the amount of energy you can get per acre.
Far to often we are chasing after foolish dreams where we can "grow" energy out of the ground. That ain't going to happen. We learned that during the industrial revolution when we denuded large woodlands to feed that day's tiny energy needs.
I learned that when I figured out that it would take five or six dozen Iowas covered completely with corn to ethanol our way out of oil. Sorry, folks, even a factor of three improvement w/ cellulose isn't going to fix the problem -- the energy density is too damn low for bio-anything.
Plants of any kind store the smallest fraction of incident sunlight as energy. End of discussion, please move along to something else and quit wasting precious R&D money on BS and buzzwords.
----calcs below for the nerds who are interested
20,000,000 bbl oil/day(US only) times 365 days/year = 7,300,000,000 bbl oil/year used in USA
There's 42gal/bbl of oil, so USA consumes 306,600,000,000gal/year of oil.
Assuming all that oil is used as fuel (yes, not true, but close enough for this calculation, and using gasoline as having the typical energy content-- I'm only looking to get the right order of magnitude)
1.50 gallons of ethanol has the same energy content as 1 gal "oil" (that's the number for gasoline, but not too far off for diesel, jet fuel, etc).
So, 459,900,000,000 gal/year ethanol are needed.
Pessimists say it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it will yield -- in other words, it can never be self-sufficient as a fuel source. But optimists argue (the most optimistic of the optimists) that there's a 1.30 return-- that is, 1 gallon ethanol would be burned to make 1.3 gallon of ethanol. That's running tractors, transportation, and mfg./distilling plants (turning corn into ethanol).
So, to make the amount of ethanol we need, we'd need to burn another 353,769,230,769 gal/year of ethanol.
That means we need to farm enough to make a total of 813,669,230,769 gal/year of ethanol.
Right now, we get about 370 gallons/acre yield for corn. Sure, other stuff, e.g., switchgrass, is 2 -3 times better, but corn for now. We can divide by three later.
That means 2,199,106,029 total acres needed doing nothing but growing corn. There's 640acres/sq mile, so 3,436,103 sq miles of corn needed.
Pennsylvania is 46,055 square miles. Iowa is 56,272. Indiana is only 36,418 sq miles, Kansas is 82,277, so lets just say 50k for those size of states.
So, thats about 69 Pennsylvania/Iowa/Kansas/Indiana sized states growing nothing but corn.
If we switch to switchgrass, divide by three, and we're at the much more reasonable 23 Penn/Iowa-sized states completely covered by nothing but switchgrass. In addition to the farms that are there growing food now.
Radioactivity thought for the day:
Magnitude of radioactivity is inversely proportionalt to half life.
In other words, if it has a lot of disintigrations/second per unit (moles, mass, don't care), it has a short half life. If it is relatively stable (i.e., not that radioactive), it has a long half life.
The really dangerous stuff from a radiation standpoint (short-lived fission products) decay away quickly.
Geoff, read the Wikipedia article again; several concerns are listed there. Besides NIMBY (which is indeed a concern):
-Earthquakes: Yucca Mountain is in Nevada, which is the 3rd most active earthquake region in the United States. Government geologists say that the geology of Yucca Mountain protects it from earthquake damage, and engineers say the facility will be tough enough to endure any reasonably-likely earthquake.
-Leakage: The containers that will be used to store the waste are certified to not leak for 10,000 years. Besides questioning that rating (since no actual 10,000 year test is feasible, and engineers are relying on extrapolations from experimetal evidence), there are fears that if somehow a leak or spill does occur, for whatever reason, the waste could filter down through cracks in the geological structure and pollute the water table.
-Native American Holy Site: Several tribes have claimed Yucca Mountain is part of their ancestral heritage and is a region of great cultural significance.
Additionally, the State of Nevada raised several concerns about the project, which can be seen in a PDF file that is Reference 15 of the Wikipedia article.
The Yucca Mountain question was the "ethanol pledge" of Nevada. I think there really is no alternative in the short run to increasing our use of nuclear power plants; our development of other "alternative" fuel sources is still in its infancy, but the need for non-fossil-fuel energy is here today. It's possible we cannot wait 10 or 20 years to develop workable alternative energy sources before human forcing of climate change overwhelms the planet's ability to recover.
The NIMBY concerns need to be addressed. There needs to be a sizable public relations effort, with independently-reviewed scientific analyses presented to the public as clearly an understandably as possible. If there are legitimate safety concerns, address them and then show your work so the public can see what you did. I suspect a lot of NIMBY is fear of the unknown and misunderstood. That doesn't mean dismiss it out of hand as ignorance. These people are taking a significant risk and deserve to have their questions answered satisfactorily.
I agree with rxc that we need to add reprocessing of spent fuel to the list of initiatives we pursue. Even radioactive waste should not be, er, wasted as a possible fuel source. Of course, thermodynamics says that at some point you have to give up and just dispose of the waste, so there will always be a need for some kind of place like Yucca Mountain. The question becomes: if not there, where?
I do not share rxc's cynicism about having to let "the enviros" turn out the lights before anything will happen. I don't think a significant number of "enviros" are advocating going back to the Stone Age. Rather, they want a civilized world that respects the enviroment and consumes resources in a manner that does the least damage. It has to be possible to figure out a way to have nuclear power that doesn't lead to massive ecological damage. I'm sure we can do it.
Thanks, liberalrob, great response, exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for.
I also agree with practically everything you said in the comment, and your read on likely future events. I hadn't even known the debate was in Las Vegas, which leads much faster to the "ethanol pledge" viewpoint you suggested.
The Earthquakes paragraph seems to dismiss itself. The Leakage fear seems pretty unlikely to me, but the whole "only site above water table, and the rocks leak" is at least a significant item in my mind.
I'm not particularly interested in certifying any government venture out to 250,000 years, or even 10,000 years. I can't begin to guess what technology and human habitation will look like then, and I don't consider "let someone else deal with this in 1,000 years" to be an irresponsible dodge. I don't plan my personal vacations 75 years in advance. I don't see why a government that changes every 8 years should be expected to plan its environmental and energy policy 1,000 years ahead, when it hasn't even existed that long.
That said, the 50 years cited by the Nevada PDF is definitely cause for concern. Several of the statements made in the Nevada PDF seem like pretty legitimate concerns though they admit that at least one of them (the drip shields) has been addressed already. It eventually comes down to an "our scientists vs. theirs" match, and I lack the data and expertise to call that contest.
But like you, I think we NEED nuclear storage somewhere, so we should be saying "here's how to do it right, perhaps at some extra cost", rather than saying "don't do it." I don't share your faith that Nevadans will respond well to a public relations effort lead by independently reviewed scientific analysis, but I agree that the local fears need to be assuaged somehow. And of course I agree on the reprocessing, though it doesn't really eliminate the storage need, only make it more efficient.
Anyway, thanks for the well written and thought-out response. I appreciate it.
Rxc,
The majority, by volume (but not radioactivity), of the nations waste is contaminated soil from weapons processing plants. Unlike reactors or reactor fuel processing facilities, these places had virtually no environmental monitoring. Contaminants spilled into nearby soil, causing a very inefficient mess. Pounds of unwanted material created tons of waste. This waste has no potential use or value and should be sent to Yucca mountain immediately. Whatever the safety concerns, it is better in Yucca mountain than where it is.
I used to think the same thing about spent fuel. I've come around to your thinking on that. Hopefully, there is adequate security and safety at nuclear plants. If not, what happens to spent fuel is probably not going to be our primary concern.
Njorl,
Yucca mountain is supposed to store only nuclear fuel waste, not low level waste from decontamination of soil in any of the weapons complexes, or even the normal operation waste that hospitals, universities, or nuclear power plants generate. Then will take spent fuel rods from the plants, intact, and store them there in canisters on railroad cars in tunnels in the mountain, behind locked doors.
The waste you are talking about stays right where is was generated, in Washington or South Carolina, because that is where the current low-level waste disposal sites are located. Some of the TRU is going to the WIPP, but that is another PR boondogle.
I think we should build more plants, and reprocess the waste, but the way we are going about it is horrible. No one is willing to tell the truth about either the plants or the waste, because it is politically unacceptable, because the public has an irrational fear of radiation.