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And why would it be stupid to use a more efficient power source than coal?...
Wind is actually competitive price wise with Nuclear and solar will get there soon. Then of course there is still hot rock geothermal to explore. All of these should be exhausted before we even consider new Nuclear plants for several reasons. For starters, Nuclear plants require a lot of concrete which means a good deal of CO2 emissions to build. They also require a lot of fresh water. (Of course everything does but Nuclear is up there.) Additionally, the foot print of a Nuclear power plant is roughly the same size if not a little bigger than wind or solar plants per kWh; except once you shut down the nuclear plant and build a new one the land the old plant was on is pretty much good for nothing for centuries at least.
The disposal of Nuclear waste continues to be a problem that doesn't have a solution. Even if it did have a solution it is relatively certain to be much more expansive in the long run than avoiding producing the waste in the first place. Further, even if there was a cheap and acceptable solution there is no rational reason to take the risk of the solution failing when there are other viable options. Note that in this case waste does not just mean spent fuel. That waste is only a small portion of the dangerous radioactive waste produced for nuclear power. Someone has to mine the Uranium and not all of the Uranium mined gets out of the rocks. Additionally, the decay of the Uranium means it is surrounded by unwanted radioactive elements. All this radioactive waste rock is generally dumped in big piles like any other form of mine waste were wind and rain can spread it far and wide. After that the Uranium needs to be enriched which leaves behind tons and tons of depleted Uranium which is essentially dumped in shallow trenches and covered with dirt, or made into bullets that are shot at people and left in the field.
Then there is of course the risk of a nuclear accident. It doesn't matter how many safety features you put into a system eventually given enough time an accident will happen of some degree. Why take that risk with the lives of the people working at the plant and possibly the people within miles of the plant when there are better alternatives. Alternatives I might add that in the worse case scenarios would be very hard pressed to kill one person. Note here that this does not just include problems with the reactor. Currently spent fuel in the US is stored in temporary cooling pools because the spent fuel is so hot it would catch fire without the water. These pools are aging and some of them were actually built several feet of the ground. Any failure of one of these pools would be about as bad as an actual meltdown of the reactor. Along those lines we must consider that any green solution must be viable around the world. Nuclear energy technology cannot be given out because any part of the technology be it reactors or enrichment can easily and simply be used to make a weapon. Giving the gift of controlled nuclear energy is the same as giving the gift of nuclear weapons. The reactors produce isotopes that can be harvested to make a weapon and given the rather inexact nature of measuring spent fuel it is hard to tell if any is missing. Enrichment facilities that can make reactor grade material can make weapons grade material with essentially no modifications and can be very easily hidden.
Anyone of the reasons above is more than enough reason to avoid nuclear energy. The combination of them makes a very strong case against expansion of nuclear energy use. Now that is not to say we should just shut down our currently operating plants. However, we should not be building more plants and we should be looking at replacing the ones at the end of their intended lifespan instead of fixing them up so they can keep running. Nuclear energy is not an answer its a problem that has the potential to be much worse than pollution from oil if we depend on it to much.
Also, you can't really compare the efficiency of Nuclear Fission Plants and Coal Plants. There are just to many differences.
And for a slightly different break down of the alternatives:
Fission
Fission is just not an option. For starters any energy solution as to be a global solution. The problem with fission is that once you have the ability to make fuel for a fission reactor you can make bomb grade material in the same facility and its basically impossible to tell which you are doing. This is even more so the case when you actually take steps to hide what you are doing. As such giving out fission technology isn't really a viable option. Incidentally, neither is building the fission plants and selling them the fuel. One of the by products is the production of Plutonium that can be used in a bomb. This can be separated from the spent fuel rods with simple chemical methods at sufficient purity to build a bomb. So even if we just gave away plants the countries that got them could still make bombs.
The other big issue is storage. We've got no where to put the waste and its going to be around for a long time and there is a lot of it. The shortest of the dangerous types has a half-life of 24,000 years, the next 213,000 years, after that 2.3 million years and then 15.7 million years. These numbers are worse than they seem because it can take many many half-lives before this stuff decays to non-lethal let alone non-damaging levels. As a sense of scale recorded history doesn't even stretch back 24,000 years. Then on top of all this there are the risks of accidents and attacks and it just really stops making sense as a method of energy production.
and:
Nuclear power plants are horribly complex systems. Horribly complex systems are inherently unsafe. Worse yet the more safety features we add the greater the potential for failure. Some of the worst disasters were direct results of safety measures. Three Mile Island was caused by a stuck pressure relief value on the reactor itself. They had already been having trouble with it sticking so they put a sensor on it to indicate if it was open or closed. The thing is that one day the valve failed and stuck open and the sensor failed saying it was stuck closed. This caused an inappropriate response which came very close to a meltdown. No matter what you do things like that are going to happen and its a miracle it hasn't happened more often. Not to mention the costs of making a nuclear plant are increasing exponentially because of the safety features which aren't really doing all that much in terms of safety.
Just for reference if a nuclear plant does go in a worst case scenario event its going to probably kill more than 100 thousand people and ruin miles of land for a long time. When you loose coolant the fuel melts and the puddles at the bottom of the reactor. There it heats even more until it burns through the bottom of the reactor. It still doesn't stop there and is hot enough to actually melt through the concrete floor. The build up of the steam from this eventually causes a steam explosion that blows the containment dome apart and spreads radioactive material for miles as it gets blown by the wind. The funny part is that the radioactive cloud actually stays airborne for awhile and can end up coming down directly in the center of cities miles away that were originally thought to be safe.
Its just horribly irresponsible to keep using a technology that has already killed tens of thousands (Chernobyl) and will eventually kill many more. This is even more so when we have other energy sources that demonstrably work without the possibility of all those deaths. Its even more ridiculous that the main motivating factor is that currently nuclear power costs a little less so its perfectly ok to risk human life and ecological catastrophe. (This is very ironic considering all the hoopla about wind power bird deaths that is blown out of proportion and no where near as bad as a nuclear accident.) There simply is no logical reason to ever build a nuclear power plant. The land is basically useless forever (in human terms) once the plant it decommissioned. Tons (about 740,000 tons in the US) of depleted Uranium is just dumped or used for bullets essentially dumping it on other countries. The left over dirt from the mining of the Uranium in the first place is also dangerously radioactive and is also simply dumped somewhere. Nuclear also takes much longer to build and get operational than wind or intermediate size solar. Then there is the spent fuel problem.
Current reactors produce about 20 tons of spent fuel per year per reactor and we already have 59,000 tons stockpiled in cooling pools. There are currently 104 nuclear reactors operating in the US making 2080 tons of spent fuel a year. We'd need to increase that number by at least 3 if not 4 times to get the majority of our power from nuclear so that's 6000 to 8000 tons of spent fuel a year on top of the 59,000 tons we already have no where to put. Last I heard in February Yucca mountain was no longer under consideration as a dumping place. It turns out it was a pretty bad place to being with having once been an active volcano.
So now we have almost 60,000 tons of highly dangerous spent fuel (and more coming everyday) sitting in relatively non-secure, sometimes not very safe, and in most cases decades old cooling pools. Cooling pools that already tend to leak and if the water ever gets below a certain level the rest will basically boil off and even before that the radiation in the pool room would be deadly. After that it'll catch fire and burn loosing highly radioactive smoke into the air which would be carried by the wind most likely to populated areas. Its basically as bad as a meltdown in terms of contamination. Nuclear fission was just a bad idea to begin with and has only gotten worse with time.
As for real alternatives we have more than enough wind and solar energy alone to meet our needs. On top of that we have hot rock geothermal which can be done anywhere and could meet the energy of the world hundreds of times over with ease all by itself. To expound a little on the drawbacks of wind and solar:
Land Use:
Wind
Wind land use is nowhere near what people make it out to be. It used to be a problem with the older and smaller turbines that where first put up in California. The blades moved faster and so you had issues with throwing ice. They also had large truss support towers that look sort of like the Eiffel tower which take up a lot of space. (They have other draw backs which will be addressed later.) What's even worse is that they were set up basically shoulder to shoulder to the point where the blades almost overlapped and all facing into the prevailing wind. That and they are relatively short. The combination of these factors made them very inefficient uses of land. Not to mention the best wind potential is like 50 miles offshore anyway.
Modern wind turbines are giant and set on single poles with no support structure. They take maybe half an acre or so of land for the actual pole and a little more for the access road to get to it. Their size also means the blades spin much slower. Further they are designed in combination with this slower speed so that they only shed ice straight downward when a blade reaches the bottom. No more chucking dangerous pieces of ice. Not to mention the turbines are now hundreds of feet in the air. The net effect is that you can farm and graze animals all the way up to basically the pole of a modern wind turbine. When you add it all up Natural Gas plants use 3.7 acres of land per MW, Nuclear uses 2-3 acres per MW, and modern Wind power comes in at 3 acres per MW. So in reality there is no problem at all.
Solar
The main potential of solar power lies in intermediate size solar systems. We're talking putting solar panels mainly over parking lots. For comparison, with current solar technology if we covered 10% of the land that we have already paved (US only) in solar cells we could meet 100% of the nation's energy demand. This also translates to about 1/3 of the land currently used for military basis. Both figures count only used land area that is in the physically connect 48 states. This is land that has already been more or less destroyed in terms of Nature and can continue to be used by humans as we intended while also generating power. There is the added benefit to doing solar over parking lots in terms of Vehicle to Grid (V2G) technology when electric cars become more common. V2G technology is very promising in terms of smoothing out the power fluctuations that can sometimes happen with solar as well as improving the performance and reducing the operating cost of electric cars.
Note that there is still room for the efficiency of solar panels to double which would reduce the figure by half. Also note that no one wants to rely 100% on solar or wind. The current figures generally stated are around 20% from wind and around 30% from solar with the balance of the left over power made up for with other less mature renewable technologies (tidal, geothermal, biofuel, etc), efficiency, and conservation. There would probably still be some large solar plants put up in some places but nothing nearly as bad as what some people would have you believe. Additionally the areas will only shrink as the technology improves.
Bird Kill:
This is where those old support towers from the wind turbines come in. Birds tend to be rather good at avoiding moving objects and not so good at avoiding stationary ones. Generally speaking the turbine blades don't kill the birds. The problem with bird kills is basically exclusive to the California wind farms that were built with those Eiffel tower like support structures closely packed in a line. When a flock of birds try to fly through that some smack into the metal trusses and some are forced into the metal trusses by the birds next to them. This can be a big problem but has mostly been eliminated by several key changes:
1) Single pole construction greatly reduces the bird lethal bird strikes on the support structure.
2) Wind turbines are now huge and very very far apart. So far apart the squeezing effect isn't really an issue.
3) The wind potential in an area is now very accurately mapped and turbines are placed to optimize performance. They can also swivel 360 degrees and change the pitch of their blades to take full advantage of the wind to produce greater efficiency. Combined with larger size this means less turbines and giant wide open spaces between them.
4) Before anyone bothers to build a wind farm the check bird migration routes so as not to put them in the way in the first place.
5) The best wind is a good ways off the coast in basically any large body of water to begin with.
To really get a perspective on this you have to compare the number of bird kills via other human activities. Current wind farms kill about 2.6 birds per turbine per year and to get 20% of our current electricity demand we'd need 211,000 turbines which would kill about 550,000 birds a year. In contrast to that communications towers (cell, TV, radio etc) kill 4-5 million birds in a year. Pesticides and oil spills kill 67-76 million birds in a year. Vehicle collisions claim another 80 million birds every year. The buildings we live in work in are attributed with 78 million to 930 million total kills depending on various factors and who you ask. Finally, the number one undisputed champ is domestic house cats which kill about 450 million birds every year. So as you can see not only are wind farm bird kills a non-issue we could potentially cause a net decrease in the number of birds killed just by eliminating the need to ship and pipe oil.
