On Aug 3, 7:55 am, "Michael Tobis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 8/1/07, Hank Roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > The thing about fission power is, as a doctor I know says about
> > suicide, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
>
> Can you be specific? What is more temporary about the problem than
> about the solution?
>
> mt
Basically we have to stop increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, no
question. Peter Ward makes the case in "Under a Green Sky" and I
think in the current Sci. American.
That's the temporary problem ---- emitting net excess CO2 at all.
That has to be solved in this century or the climate system goes far
beyond anything we can. The consequences of however much CO2 we do
emit go on for half a millenium or more before the system equilibrates
and the natural processes start reducing CO2 again.
Fission plants are useful for maybe 50 years. The cleanup of the
resulting mess and storage of the radioactive waste, including the
actual plant itself, takes quite a while thereafter. I think building
a huge number of new fission plants will cause cleanup problems that
would persist long after we fix our problem with CO2.
Each fission plant built is going to buy that roughly 50 years of
generating capacity, and those decades of cleanup and hundreds of
years of storage costs.
Building a closed cycle coal plant run on liquid oxygen, producing
concentrated CO2 for sequestration and electricity (and perhaps liquid
nitrogen removed from the input gas, if we have superconducting
electric power cables that will run at liquid nitrogen temperatures)
is the comparison big-utility choice. If we manage superconducting
cables at liquid-nitrogen temperatures, then the whole rail system is
availabe for rights-of-way to lay them out, and that adds the
possibility of using electric locomotives widely too.
All this is intended to stretch out for some half millenium or more
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