That's all fine. But what if millions of cars start spewing water vapor into the air? Any studies show what kind of effect that will have?
Cars have been emitting water vapor since their inventions. The end products of any hydrocarbon compounds after complete oxidation contain water. What's the beef with that?
Yes, there are studies. Did you read your own links? Water has saturated the air. An increase in water vapor is only a byproduct of an increase of another greenhouse gas, usually carbon dioxide. Think about it. Oceans have been evaporating water for hundreds of millions of years. The air is saturated. If millions of cars spew out water, it might just rain more for a little bit, but as for global warming, there will be no effect.
I don't know about the concentration of radioactivity in waste vs. ore. All I know is that we need more research on nuclear power and preventing nuclear reactors from being built restricts scientists' ability to study real-life activities of nuclear power.
Everyone spews water vapor when they breathe. Perhaps more clouds would be formed and the reflected light from it would help cool down the earth. No one really knows, just as no one really knows how much CO2 the earth can handle. While water is a greenhouse gas, the main culprits are methane and carbon dioxide. Nitrates and sulfites are more troublesome when it comes back down as acid rain. Switching out of fossil fuels has other benefits as well. The city's air would be much cleaner, would have less particulate matter that causes lung cancer, and have less polution in the form of acid rain, polluted runoff, and gasoline leakages. The aesthetic value would improve as it would take longer for buildings to brown. Hydrogen is still a long way to go. One environmental concern would be its storage. Should it be in gaseous form, a hydrogen leak of around 5% would be enough to damage and weaken our ozone layer.
MartianMan, from what I read, hydrogen-based processes generally have very low or even negative EROEI. Another draw back is it requires tremendous amount of precious metals, such as platinum, for large scale production.
Everyone spews out carbon dioxide when they breathe and methane when they fart. I'm not arguing against hydrogen cars! I'm just bringing up a point for discussion.
I will agree with you that more research is needed but in the meantime until someone can show me a good way of dealing with the waste I'm going to remain skeptical about fission based nuclear power. Now if someone can develop controlled fusion that doesn't take a huge amount of energy input then I'm all for it.
So if someone develops a super clean and efficient power source, you wouldn't be against it? I don't feel that fusion will be utilized within the decade, maybe in several decades. In the meantime, we have to use what we have. It's either nuclear or gas/coal. I guess solar and geo-power (wind, water) would work but they aren't well developed either and fluctuate day by day. So to utilize geo-power, we need a very efficient storage device, which we don't have. Nuclear has so much untapped potential, it's a shame we aren't studying it as much as we should.
That is definitely true. Of course almost all energy sources we use have a low EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested?). I don't think the energy return is the main issue however. The Sun provides massive amounts of energy that is not utilized and so does nuclear material. There are many sources of energy that are financially feasible. The main problems involved are pollution and storage. Hydrogen solves both. Nuclear power solves the problem of energy investment. Plus, by creating a central location for energy storage (as opposed to cars), the power plant can be far more efficient than any car can be at creating energy, storing energy, and dealing with waste. While platinum is the metal of choice for H2 creation, I'm sure as technology progresses other mechanisms will be discovered. We need more time and money spent into nuclear power. Plus, platinum only serves as a catalyst. But yea, problems still exist, but the solution is getting close. We need some more support!
Just say no to more humidity! The benefits of Yucca mountain are worth the risks. Face it, the 104 nuclear facilities in the US have already produced thousands of tons of waste that is just sitting in temporary holding facilities a thousand times less secure than Yucca mountain. We have to ship that and store it anyway so if we spend 50 billion dollars developing the best system humanly possible, we might as well use it to produce relatively cheap, relatively clean energy. Or we can learn to live at an energy consumption level significantly lower than that to which we have become accustomed. But that's not bloody likely since energy consumption = quality of life.
Except that you can produce hydrogen with renewables like solar, wind and geothermal and hydrogen provides the solution for dealing with fluctuations in availability of those power sources. Further those sources produce no waste unlike nuclear. Alll of the advantages you cite from nuclear and hydrogen can be gained from renewables and hydrogen with the advantage of not having to deal with highly radioactive waste for at least hundreds of years.
So what do you do when Yucca mountain fills up or if you find out that Yucca mountain isn't as geologically stable as thought? I agree we gotta do something with the waste we have now but until we can figure out a way to get rid of the waste why keep on creating more waste we're going to be stuck with for centuries or millenia.
I don't believe that solar, wind, and geothermal power will provide enough energy to power the globe like nuclear can, currently. That'd be great if we develop the technology to utilize natural power efficiently. The nuclear "waste" that is produced may eventually be used as well. Not studying nuclear power isn't going to help increase our knowledge of nuclear power...
I'll give you the same answer that you posted on nuclear. Shouldn't we be doing more research into renewables? Without building more renewable power plants we're not going to be able to find out more. As far as enough energy to power the globe on a sunny day there's probably enough energy in the wind and sunshine falling on South Dakota to power the US. There's renewable energy everywhere, in the air, sky, oceans, ground and plants its just a matter of tapping it and storing it.
I mean we don't have the technology to extract the energy needed from wind, solar, etc. to power the US. But nuclear will provide enough power. I agree we need more research into both areas. But currently, only nuclear can solve our power needs.
We have the technology to extract energy from solar and wind and have had it for years, centuries in the case of wind. What we don't have is a good way of storing it. If we use renewables to generate hydrogen and then use hydrogen to generate electricity problem solved.
I never said we couldn't extract energy. I said we can't extract enough energy to power the US. Maybe in 10 years it'll be financially feasible to do so everywhere in the US. Right now, only Southern California can break even using solar power.
