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While the view may be a rather weak argument, wind power doesn't make much sense. Nuclear power is just a better way to produce energy. It's cheap, stable and j
by nawitus 14y ago
While the view may be a rather weak argument, wind power doesn't make much sense. Nuclear power is just a better way to produce energy. It's cheap, stable and just as environmentally friendly. It's too bad that politics prevent it's usage, adoption and development in so many countries. There's very little research on thorium power, too, which would solve most of the remaing negative points about nuclear power.
- gnaffle 14y ago"Just as environmentally friendly"? Since when did Wind power require long term storage of waste? Nuclear power depends on public trust (which is reflected in politics). That trust was just about built up again after Chernobyl when Fukushima happened. Now we'll probably have to wait another 20-30 years (except in China and India, which as both actively pursuing nuclear energy).
- nawitus 14y ago>"Just as environmentally friendly"? Since when did Wind power require long term storage of waste? Never claimed it did. However, the single property/factor of "does it require long term storage of waste" does not determine environmental friendliness, although it's certainly a factor. There are a multitude of factors that people base different weights on. Carbon emissions is a good starting point, and nuclear is even with wind on that one.
- gnaffle 14y agoSo, if wind energy doesn't create waste, doesn't require mining and enrichment and doesn't have a chance of causing a major environmental disaster, how can you claim nuclear energy is "just as environmentally friendly"?
- mpyne 14y agoWhat fantasy world do you live in where the components (both structural and electrical) of a wind turbine require no mining? Either way though this whole discussion is just ridiculous. Nuclear isn't competing with wind, it's competing with fossil-fueled thermal generation. All of the wind energy that Denmark is producing per this article is less than 1/6th of a single Canadian nuclear power plant (Bruce N.G.S.).
- gnaffle 14y agoOf course the construction material requires mining. My point was that there is no way you can plausibly claim that nuclear and wind power are equally environmentally friendly. I'm really tired of all the pro-nuclear people here that can't wait to trash any renewable energy as utopian and irrelevant while downplaying the downsides of nuclear power.
- tiredofcareer 14y agoIn case you didn't realize it, you're arguing that wind power doesn't "make much sense" on an article describing an entire nation implementing almost 25% of its total electric power demand via wind, and planning to raise that to 50% within a decade. I'm just reminding you in case you didn't realize that. The only problem described in the article is having too much energy (crikey Moses, what a nightmare, we have to fix the grid). If a wind turbine falls over, the impact is a little less than if a tsunami envelops a nuclear plant, isn't it? Not to mention dealing with waste for hundreds or thousands of years? (I'm not anti-nuclear, just not delusional about its downfalls, and let's face it, there are many. Thorium has waste too.)
- penny500 14y agoDenmark's population is smaller than New York City by a couple million. The US would need a massive, massive number of windmills.
- tiredofcareer 14y agoHe didn't write that wind power doesn't make sense for the United States. He wrote that it doesn't make sense, period. You just put words in his comment, then used the words you invented to dispute me instead. I loathe when people do that. You might argue that contextually, given the comment he was responding to, I should have inferred some kind of Americentric context but he goes on to write "nuclear power is better," so there you have it. You might see that as pedantry, but since I'm an American I'm acutely aware of how Americans like to say "that would never work" when what they actually mean "that would never work for Americans." The United States is enormous and the #1 consumer of electric energy, yes, and we need to plan accordingly. That doesn't mean ideas are bad in the general, it just means things won't work for us due to our size, as you astutely observe. Google could never scale PostgreSQL to handle their index; does that make PostgreSQL silly? You're automatically writing off all future development that you could never possibly know when you dismiss a technology because it doesn't work in one case. I like to use every opportunity I get to point that out, so my fellow Americans will stop doing it and making us look like self-absorbed, spoiled people internationally, an assumption reinforced by our general diplomatic and military behavior on the world stage.
- Systemic33 14y agoNuclear Power in its current state of developement isn't really ready, because of the huge complications it can generate when not kept in a perfect order. Even so-called "This nuclear can never go wrong because of its design", have proven not perfect, usually due to human errors. I don't mean to come of as an anti-nuclear, I just look at the various incidents that have occured, although usually minor, it only takes one big, to screw things up. The nuclear power I look forward to, and which i think is the real hero to come, is fusion power. The way it works, it simply cannot physically create disasters similar to fission, because it needs energy to create energy, and if the energy stopped, the output would stop. Additionally to that, it doesn't generate the nuclear waste products associated with fission power, and can thus without worry be installed in more problematic countries.
- cdash 14y agoWe have already had a big accident though. It was called Chernobyl and it did not even come close to being as dangerous as other forms of energy production spread out over time. Since then nuclear power has only become much safer, the problem with nuclear power is not a technological problem. The problems is merely a political problem brought about by the irrational mind of humans and our poor ability to reason about risk.
- straight_talk 14y agoReally? Tell that to the tens of thousand of USSR 18-20 yo soldiers, that were called biorobots during the cleanup. 100% of them either died or ended with very serious cases of cancer and kids with malformation. IMHO one has to be literally mad to advocate for nuclear power.
- gnaffle 14y agoThe problem with nuclear power is trust. That trust was broken with Chernobyl, and broken again with Fukushima. Pre-Fukushima, most pro nuclear people would argue that the chance of a nuclear accident in an first world country was close to zero. Even I used to argue that. Now we can say that with new safeguards of more modern reactors that the same kind of accident can't happen again, and it might very well be true. But the voting people will be less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. They will rather accept a known and quantified danger instead.
- markvdb 14y agoI'll bite. Nuclear as commercially implemented today is uninsurable. Even without insurance, a nuclear power plant is an extremely complex, capital intensive machine. The technology may be perfectly sound, with scientists able to control it perfectly, but the problem to me is the top heavy organisational structure. The management water head. I do agree more research is needed towards passive security compact scale fission using thorium. After investing a lot of money into harvesting wind, that is.
- tome 14y agoIndeed, or more revealingly, it will be insured implicitly by the government. But governments know this.
- arbitrarywords 14y agoYeh, this is the thing I always find a bit suspicious about nuclear power. If noone is prepared to price the risk (and can also realistically pay out on a claim) then how can you ever come up with a $/KW price for comparison?
- jeltz 14y agoSame thing for hydroelectric plants. If we look at historical disasters hydro power has caused way more damage.
- sabertoothed 14y agoAhh, shit. I'll bite, too. A team of journalists just discovered the barrels of nuclear waste that the UK threw in the ocean. 17,000 tons of nuclear waste just near the British island Alderney. "It is just as environmentally friendly." Yeah, sure. source: http://www.dw.de/atommüllfässer-im-ärmelkanal-entdeckt/av-16739934 http://www.dw.de/atommüllfässer-im-ärmelkanal-entdeckt/av-16... Or read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
- nawitus 14y ago>"It is just as environmentally friendly." Yeah, sure. Bad policies implemented in a single country doesn't determine environmental friendliess of a energy production technology as a whole. Obviously a nuclear power plant is not environmentally friendly if the waste is not taken care of.
- straight_talk 14y agoYeah, for a few million years. What a great excuse ...
- gnaffle 14y agoNo, but you can't promote an energy source on the basis of some idealized dream where every ounce of waste is properly taken care of, when the reality is different. If the UK has handled waste in this way, do you think other countries have handled, or will handle it any better?
- nawitus 14y agoYes, I believe the country I live in will handle this better. This is our solution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repos...
- elithrar 14y ago> "It is just as environmentally friendly." Yeah, sure. Attributing the acts of a government to an entire technology doesn't seem appropriate.