I guess the issue is why not wind and solar instead of nuclear with its safety and especially waste problem. These should be purely technical issues and not a conservative vs liberal issue. Solar and wind power as far as I know is just a manufacturing problem. A new electric grid and existing technology will do it. Just massive implementation of what we already know now. No safety issues. People forget the massive infrastructure projects the USA was capable of before the anti-government ideology triumphed about 30 plus years ago. For example completely redoing the plumbing of the entire USA to give us safe drinking water. Anyone ever stop to think why the water out of the tap in Mexico's major cities makes you sick, when any idiot can dump enough chlorine in just about any water to make it potable. Nuclear is still some sort of unknown technology breakthrough away on waste disposal. Educate me if breeder reactors are really a viable solution.
Wind and solar are both intermitent power sources. Neither can ever be more than a fractional source of the total, unless you want to have brownouts or blackouts every cloudy day and evening or when the wind isn't blowing enough.
Both. Start with nuke plants and move towards W/S as the technology improves. We should have a Kennedy type declaration as he did with the moon mission from our new president ...we will be energy independent within two decades.
Wind is fine for small scale production, but solar is fool's play. On total costs, solar power costs 3 times as much (operating cost) as any traditional source, mostly because of extremely difficult maintenance. Right now, solar power production is subsidized with taxes on fossil fuels. If we got rid of the subsidies, the solar plants would shut down immediately. Wind has a really high capital cost and long payout compared to coal and gas, but after the windmills are built, they are really cheap to run. The subsidies are only necessary for the building, not the operation. There is no solar technology available or thought to be available that would work for a real energy source.
I think modular pebble bed reactors would be safer, in both security and a technical standpoint, in the long haul. Flywheels STORING POWER Just as buildings of the future are likely to generate their own electricity, they may also be able to store it. During the past five years, at least five companies have begun developing flywheels, which function like mechanical batteries. Operating on the same principle as a potter's wheel, a flywheel disc is set to spinning at high speed by an integrated electric motor/generator. It is contained inside an airless case, almost eliminating resistance so that the ensuing long duration of the spin serves as a means of storing kinetic energy which can then be converted to electricity by the generator as needed. Although invented over a century ago, the flywheel only became practical with the development of strong, lightweight composite materials in the 1970s and 1980s. Modern composites can spin in a vacuum at up to 200,000 revolutions per minute, with the potential to store and release energy at an efficiency of more than 90 percent. Because they have virtually frictionless electromagnetic bearings, flywheels can store electricity for weeks, and last years before wearing out. Flywheels would last much longer than chemical batteries, and would not require toxic substances. The materials needed to manufacture them are not expensive, and their design readily lends them to mass production, which will yield much lower costs. Because they could be used as storage devices in electric cars as well as in buildings, the ultimate market for flywheels could add up to millions of units. It will probably be 10 to 15 years before flywheels are widely available commercially, but after that, their use could grow as fast as that of cellular phones has in the early 1990s.
Opening dislcaimer, I'm not an expert on this, and my only knowledge is what I've read from internet articles previously. Wind intertency can be mitigated somewhat by spreading out wind farms and not putting all your turbines in one spot. And if wind power gets to the point of producing excess energy during off peak periods in the early morning (still a long way away from such a scenario), the thought is people will have plug-in electric/hybrid cars to charge overnight in the future so not all of it will go to waste. Thermal solar energy systems can easily store energy to be released at later peak period times in the evening because they use steam/water. Ausra's design Photovoltaic (PV) solar is expensive atm, but costs are projected to go down. Solar thermal seems to be cheaper atm and a 5MW plant has already opened in California, with bigger projects already in construction. I couldn't find specific costs but this year old article claims Ausra is able to deliver electricity at 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour with is very close to the cost of coal powered electricity. My guess is solar and wind will both be important going forward, and the % of power they supply is so low atm anyway, it'll be awhile before any intermitency issue will become a problem. Having multiple technologies is also a good thing as demand has seen material cost go up for wind turbines and silicon using PV solar; so putting all the research money into one technology won't necessarily reduce costs. Back on topic I'm interested to read more about these mini reactors. Over history there have been quite a few nuclear accidents and even if the reactors themselves are 100% leak proof, as glynch has mentioned, carting the waste all over the place to dispose of them is kinda scary.
Nice idea in theory. Probably overpriced in reality. And the waste issue is non-trivial. Unacceptably, frankly.
Yeah, there is no way those reactors are only 25 million per unit. ____ We've more or less been powering small cities with reactors for decades -- also known as aircraft carriers - on a smaller scale in subs.
I would like to see more about these mini-nuke reactors and from the original article they don't sound like what we are putting in subs and aircraft carriers. What is being proposed are reactors that require little maintenance and have no moving parts. The ones fueling the USS Intrepid and Ohio class aren't anything like that.
