[mythtv-users] [Slightly OT] solar power for all our gadgets

[Carl Reynolds]

Jeff Walther wrote:
>
>> Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:29:41 -0500
>> From: Andrew Close <aclose at gmail.com>
>
>
> And it didn't have to be this way, but misguided or just evil people 
> flat out lied about nuclear power and scared the public.  Actually, 
> what appears to have happened is that when the Vietnam War ended a 
> subset of the activists found that their lives were unfulfilling 
> without an all consuming cause, so they whipped up The Union of 
> Concerned Scientists and a couple of other nutty organizations and 
> chose the nuclear power industry (easy to confuse with nuclear 
> weapons, doncha know?) as their new great devil.  Their original old 
> cause (Vietnam War) was a pretty good one, so a lot folks went along 
> when they trumped up their new one.  The anti-nuclear cause was a 
> disaster for the USA and the environment.
>
> If we had built ten nuclear power plants per year since 1980, none of 
> our electricity production would produce any carbon today.
>
>
> Jeff Walther
>
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>

I'm reluctant to respond to this e-mail because your argumentative and 
strident tone makes me feel that I'm stepping into a hornet's nest. 
However, I'd like to point out that even though you have stated your 
opinions with a great deal of self assuredness, they are still only 
opinions and you have not backed your statements up with facts. It was, 
however, your erroneous assertions about the nuclear power industry that 
swung the balance and caused me to decide to respond.

I worked in the US Navy Nuclear Power program in the 1970s and help with 
the construction and operation of several nuclear power plants. I also 
have a degree in Physics and studied Nuclear Engineering and Nuclear 
Physics in school. It was the lax standards used by builders of civilian 
nuclear power plants that caused me to decide not to continue  my career 
with nuclear power when I got out of the Navy. Your implications that 
nuclear power is perfectly safe and it is only the rantings of a few 
radicals that have convinced the public that nuclear power can not be 
trusted have no basis in fact.

The fact is that there have been numerous accidents in US nuclear power 
plants because of short cuts being taken in construction and training of 
the people who run them. Most of the accidents are not serious enough to 
have been brought to the public attention, therefore you may be excused 
for not being aware of them, You are correct that the dangers of 
exposure to radiation from any nuclear power plant in the US are quite 
minimal. However, you, along with every one else who discusses the pros 
and cons of nuclear power have ignored the two major issues that make 
nuclear power plants a menace.

First, no one has come up with a way of safely disposing of the huge 
amounts of radioactive waste generated by a nuclear power plant. When a 
plant is operated for a period of twenty years (the minimum amount of 
time necessary to break even on the construction cost of the plant) it 
will generate a mass of radioactive waste equal to the mass of all the 
material that went into the original construction of the plant. Also 
keep in mind that it is not safe to operate any nuclear power plant for 
more that forty to fifty years because of  the deterioration of 
materials due to exposure to radiation. This deterioration requires 
complete replacement of the plant at end of life leaving another vast 
pile of radioactive material.

The radioactive waste from a nuclear plant will remain deadly for 
thousands of years  after the original plant has ceased to exist. We 
have absolutely no way to guarantee that we can protect future 
generations from being exposed to this radiation. We bury it in the 
ground and hope that the ground around it stays stable and put up signs 
that say 'Don't dig here', but who is to guarantee that the signs will 
continue to exist a thousand years from now or that people will be able 
to read it? When I've asked people in the industry how we are dealing 
with this, the response is always, "We'll figure that out at some point, 
but nuclear power is too important now for us to hold off on production 
while we figure out how we will protect people in the future from our 
radioactive waste."

The second, and possibly more important, issue with nuclear power is 
that it uses the Carnot cycle for generation of electricity. Let me note 
here that this problem is not unique to nuclear power plants. All 
electrical generation plants that use any heat source to run their 
generators use a Carnot cycle engine and should probably be replaced for 
the same reasons we should not be building more nuclear power plants.

A Carnot cycle engine, by definition, uses heat to turn water into steam 
and uses that steam as a motive power to produce work (such as 
generating electricity). Once the work is extracted from the steam, it 
is turned back into water and heated again to produce steam. This is 
where the Carnot cycle engine becomes dangerous, because in turning the 
spent steam back into water we have to extract and throw away any latent 
energy in the steam. This latent energy is thrown into the environment 
as heat. By definition, the maximum theoretical efficiency of any Carnot 
cycle engine is 33% and most run at closer to 20% or even 15%. This 
means that any where from 66% to 85% of all the energy used to run the 
Carnot cycle engine is being dumped directly into the environment.

Nuclear power is not the answer to all of our energy problems as some 
would have you believe. It is not even an answer to our energy problems 
and I hope that we will wake up soon and run (not walk) away from 
nuclear power. While it has been shown that carbon is having an effect 
on our environment, no one is talking about the huge amounts of heat we 
are adding directly to the environment a a result of all the Carnot 
cycle engines we use nor what affect that may have on global warming.



Carl.