On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 2:25 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com>wrote:
> There are many reasons why nuclear power is dead in the water. > I think the main reason is that reactors got too big too fast and their design has been frozen for nearly half a century. They found a nuclear reactor design that worked well in submarines and figured if they just scaled it up a few hundred times it would work well in commercial power plants too, but it didn't work out quite that way. Freeman Dyson said the real problem is that reactor design isn't fun anymore because nobody is allowed to build even a small one if it is significantly (or even slightly) different from what has already been built, so the most creative people go into areas other than nuclear power. >the sector would have never existed without massive government subsidies > Neither would wind farms or big solar energy power plants. And what do you make of the government putting a huge tariff on Chinese solar cells to protect domestic producers which makes photovoltaics much more expensive in the USA? > the lead time to bring working LFTR reactors to market and to build out > enough of them to begin to make an impact on the global (or some important > regional) energy market is long and should be measured in decades at least. > Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come online. > That would certainly be true if there is no sense of urgency to get the job done, but we got to the moon in less than 9 years once we decided we really really wanted to go there. There is no scientific reason it would take decades to get a LFTR online, but there are political reasons. > Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come > online. By that time - they will need to compete with solar PV and the per > unit costs for PV that are achieved over the next two or three decades. > Finding a good inexpensive solar cell is not enough, even more important is finding a cheap and reliable way to store vast amounts of electrical energy. And because solar energy is so dilute environmentalists will whine about the huge amounts of land required. And some applications are just not going to work, you'll never see a solar powered 747 or fighter jet. > The reason they are not getting built has less to do with political > activists and a more to do with the negative economic profile > James Hansen is one of the world's leading environmentalists and has done more to raise the alarm about climate change than anybody else, he started to do so in 1988. Hansen has recently changed his mind and is now in favor of nuclear power because he figures it causes less environmental impact than anything else, or at least anything else that wasn't moonbeams and could actually make a dent in satiating the worldwide energy demand. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
