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cole2684 said:
IMO nuclear energy is here to stay. Now seems like a good time to buy.

What do you think?

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fukushima.

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Wiccan_Seeker said:
He's right.

As time goes on more and more will come to light about the epic pollution disaster that is Fukushima, this will be a serious obstacle to the advancement of nuclear power as a primary energy alternative.

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yup. and of course chernobyl. nuclear energy is fucking reckless

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pothead_bob said:

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yup. and of course chernobyl. nuclear energy is fucking reckless

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Chernobyl happened in 1986 and nuclear power usage continued right along afterwards.  It's a clean, comparatively safe, and economical source of electricity.  Couple that with the fact that world energy demand continues to increase.  The people in charge of the show tend to know these things.  Nuclear power, IMO, is not going anywhere.  New construction will continue... especially in China.

I assume OP is talking about buying uranium mining company shares.  That might be a good play, but if you want to invest in nuclear power, specifically, I'd buy up the ETF, NLR, instead.  That said, I'd only use a small portion of my investing money (my speculation money) for that, and hold most of my investments in a broad market index fund.

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chernobyl is still happening. the sarcophagus has holes in it and is falling apart. the lid on the reactor weighs 2,000 tons and is precariously sitting tilted inside the reactor and could fall anytime causing a massive release of radioactive dust. Chernobyl is still ongoing, it is still melting down and will continue for decades if not centuries to plague europe/the world with radioactive isotopes.

The destruction underneath the reactor staggered them, not only had it lifted off the lid but had forced down the reactor base by four feet. Melted nuclear fuel material had poured out of the reactor vessel spilling into the ruins and corridors forming unusual shapes. The fuel combined with the sand to form a lava, thus trapping and diluting the radio active material. In this form the chances of another chain reaction were remote. Scientists were elated by this finding, but as one problem receded another has come to replace it - it is now the greatest risk from Chernobyl today. The concrete structure of the sarcophagus after being built in haste is crumbling. If debris falls on the 30 tons of radioactive dust the resulting cloud could escape into the environment.

The Chernobyl melt down is the only one classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The nearby city of Pripyat was not immediately evacuated after the incident, for the general population of the Soviet Union was not informed of the disaster until April 29. Chernobyl region doesn't recover from the catastrophe even after 25 years.

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Several of its isotopes such as americinium, neptunium, corium, cesium, plutonium, have extremely long half lives and will be keeping the area strongly, deadly contaminated for decades/centuries to come. It is still and will remain vacated for a long, long, long time. Japan will follow with rising cancer rates, infant mortality, leukemia, fucked thyroids, and general death and decay.

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Nuclear energy is not safe, is hardly worth the risk/reward payoff, and is going to slowly kill us all.

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Energy Source              Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average              161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China                      278
Coal – USA                        15
Oil                                36  (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas                        4  (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass                    12
Peat                              12
Solar (rooftop)                    0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind                                0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro                              0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao)    1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear                            0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

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By the way, the death caused by the Chernobyl incident pales in comparison to the death caused by all your other major electricity sources.

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DieCommie said:
Being afraid of nuclear energy is like being afraid of flying.  No matter how many statistics you have that show the car ride to the airport is more dangerous than the flight, people are still more afraid to fly than drive.

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kinda blew my mind there 

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That's true right now...but add in all the cancer deaths from decades of radiation exposure and there might be a different result.  What if something happened to Indian Point?  That has the potential to wipe out or seriously fuck up 5% of the US population living in the densest metropolitan area in the country.

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None of them are safe...but which one is safe enough for us to live with?

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None of them are safe...but which one is safe enough for us to live with?  The new Gen III+ reactors like the AP1000 will avoid catastrophes like Three Mile Island, but won't do shit for a reactor at the mercy of some freak natural disaster.  You can plan for some things, and some you can't.  Fukushima was rated to withstand an 8.2 earthquake and a 19 foot tsunami.  Everyone saw what happened when it got rocked by a 9.0 earthquake and 46 foot tsunami...apparently that hasn't happened since 869 (yes, year 869).

The rules are a bit tighter in the US.  The NRC uses regional geological data spanning 10,000 years, but that still doesn't mean that an unprecedented natural disaster will sweep over the area.  Old reactors that were originally only supposed to be licensed for 40 years are now getting extensions to 60 years, which means some places will hold off on building passive defense reactors like the AP1000.

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Point being, I don't think it's safe enough and the government is not taking the proper safety measures with old reactors for me to want to invest in Uranium mining/discovery companies.  I've been keeping an eye on a few since April...thinking that back then was a good time to buy, and they just dropped again so I'd hold off if I were you.

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Irradiated_Feces said:
fukuwhatnow? what's the other primary alternative? oil is finite and we must continue with infinite growth to keep the ponz- i mean economy going.

Yes I think now is a good time to buy uranium, while everyone else is afraid.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/03/renewableenergy.energy

or google "Graphene" see below

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-energy-storage-device-recharge-electric.html

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Do you realize that the amount of radiation exposure that you get from nuclear power energy sources is insignificant compared to natural sources like cosmic rays and decay products in the ground and man-made sources like medical x-rays and nuclear medicine?

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Your beliefs remain unsubstantiated.  It's a verifiable fact that coal power has been more damaging to the environment and human life than nuclear power.  Why not use more nuclear power in light of those facts?

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The one with the best track record and the most scrutiny from regulatory bodies (i.e. nuclear power).

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I'm talking if a meltdown occurred...not just from normal plant operations.  If an accident occurred, radiation into the extended area would certainly cause all sorts of problems. 

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So am I.  Including nuclear disasters, you get a practically insignificant amount of radiation from the nuclear power cycle. 

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That extending the life of old reactors by 20 years instead of replacing them with new reactors with new safeguards is not safe enough for me and increases the chance of a disaster in the US?

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Why not something more sustainable?

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Something where we don't have to worry about waste products that are either radioactive and/or toxic to the environment.

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Why not something more sustainable?  Something where we don't have to worry about waste products that are either radioactive and/or toxic to the environment.  Something that has an even better track record?  How about being in favor of sustainable power since we have some of the largest, windiest stretches of land in the world.  Japan just showed off the wind lens a few days ago that could increase wind turbine power by like 2 or 3 times.  Up front engineering and building costs would be large, but so would job creation for a large scale wind turbine initiative...plus the fact that we don't have to worry about buying fuel or disposing of waste for anything. 

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it's riskier than alternative

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costlier to regulate and costs money even after we get our power from it

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So am I.  Including nuclear disasters, you get a practically insignificant amount of radiation from the nuclear power cycle. 

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So living within a 20 mile radius of Fukushima would not be hazardous to my health?   I'm talking the health effects of the zone surrounding a nuclear disaster. 

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The waste issues is overstated.  For the benefit you get with nuclear power, it is worth dealing with.

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Quote:it's riskier than alternative

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That's a tremendous amount of raw material that has to be mined, refined, and shipped, lots of manufacturing (powered mostly by dirty coal), lots of maintenance costs, and a huge impact on the environment due to the tremendous amount of space that would take up.

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And despite those costs, it's still one of the most economical energy sources... much more so than wind and solar power.

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So living within a 20 mile radius of Fukushima would not be hazardous to my health?   I'm talking the health effects of the zone surrounding a nuclear disaster. 

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I don't think it is, especially if we start using more and more nuclear power...accumulating more and more waste.  A 20 year decommissioning and hundreds to thousands of years of depletion is hardly what I call overstated.

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Add in that people are already getting caught illegally dumping waste and it turns into a problem.

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Yes, and I'm not referring to coal, coal is risky...but not solar and wind power. 

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A tremendous amount of mining, refining, and shipping?  Do you think our Uranium just appears?  And that's a process that we need to repeat over and over and over to keep the nuclear fuel coming.  The space that turbines take up can still be used (and are still used).  Farms and grazing livestock are still in places where there are now wind turbines.  Not to mention offshore where there's even greater wind capacity.

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The construction of existing 1970-vintage U.S. nuclear power plants required 40 metric tons (MT) of steel and 190 cubic meters (m3) of concrete per average megawatt of electricity (MW(e)) generating capacity. For comparison, a typical wind energy system operating with 6.5 meters-per-second average wind speed requires construction inputs of 460 MT of steel and 870 m**3 of concrete per average MW(e). Coal uses 98 MT of steel and 160 m**3 of concrete per average MW(e); & natural-gas combined cycle plants use 3.3 MT steel and 27 m**3 concrete.

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But building an infrastructure of clean, renewable energy that doesn't cost us money for fuel, money for processing and money for clean-up is where I'd hope that our country will go in the future.

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Even considering those new Japanese windmills which, as far as I've seen, haven't proven anything yet.  Remember when nuclear power was still on the drawing board they said it would be "too cheap to meter".  Well I'll believe how great these new and improved windmills are when I see the first wind lens generation facility open up.

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Considering a very large windmill that can produce 1 MW, running at 35% capacity, it would take 834,312 windmills to produce that amount of power.

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And despite those costs, it's still one of the most economical energy sources... much more so than wind and solar power.

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You didn't research it at all, did you?  You just pawned it off on "I'll see it when I believe it"  The idea is completely sound  (It makes a low pressure system behind the windmill itself.  ANY windmill, with the addition of a tapered ring around it can have it's efficiency increased)  And thereby draws wind through it faster.

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Wrong, actually, I did a google search on it when I saw the post and all that came up were some news sources saying how the windmills could potentially become a viable energy source.  I didn't find any technical information on them and it seems like every site had the same amount of limited information and same youtube video.  I'm not one to believe what a treehugger news organization says at face value (I shit you not, the name of the one website was treehugger.com).  Feel free to link us to other sources that provide additional information.  Problem is, and you should be able to admit this, that technology in the R&D stage can promise lots of things.  What matters is if it can deliver. 

Ever hear of the hydrogen fuel cell?  My dad was telling me about them when I was still in high school saying how the news was calling them the future of automotive transportation.  George Bush called for a billion dollar initiative to make them the future replacement of the gasoline internal combustion engine back in 2003.  Here we are 10 years later.  Do you see any hydrogen fuel cell cars in sight?  I don't.  Maybe California has them. 

I rest my case... I'll believe the prowess of your windmills when I see them.

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If this technology works, you can divide that number by three.

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Again, your totally discounting the possible upper ends of these technologies. Thin film silicon voltaics can be made out of highly engineered films of silicon  (one of the most common elements in the universe) The upper limit of this particular technology is quite impressive.

The sunlight that actually reaches earth's surface is almost 7000 times what we use currently use.  Now this is a farfetched example and the technology to do so does not yet exist, but it would take an hour and a half of ALL the sunlight on earth surface to power us for an entire year.


Biogas.  Turning our landfills into methane factories.  It'll take retrofitting our landfills (land areas that have already been spoken for) to produce the most energetic hydrocarbon there is...  and carbon neutral.

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Now, I counter with some question.  How much uranium is there?  How fast can we build power nuclear plant?  Can building such structures keep up with exponential growth?  .....I bet photovoltaics and wind energy can be built far far faster.

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btw, living within 20 miles of a coal fired power plant will give you much higher radiation levels along with other hazardous pollutants than a nuclear power plant.  Why only consider the 2 major incidents in your analysis of the risk of nuclear power?  You sweep under the bus the hundreds of other nuclear reactors that operated for decades without any impact to the public.  Doesn't seem like a fair assessment of risk to me, but more like you're wearing horse-blinders.

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All the waste ever generated at US nuclear power plants is stored on-site

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Who is illegally dumping high-level radioactive waste from the nuclear power industry?

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My point is you need to talk all costs into consideration.  Not just fuel, which is relatively cheap for nuclear, and clean-up costs.  With wind/solar, there will be an environmental impact, there will be maintenance costs, there will likely be major logistical problems, and there will be perhaps insurmountable capital investment costs.

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I'm not one to believe what a treehugger news organization says at face value (I shit you not, the name of the one website was treehugger.com).

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Problem is, and you should be able to admit this, that technology in the R&D stage can promise lots of things.  What matters is if it can deliver.

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Ever hear of the hydrogen fuel cell?

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Therefore, it must be true and we will soon be replacing all of our electricity sources with windmills with rings.

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A lot of "ifs" and "only if technology was far enough along" in your posts.  How does that help us now?  Or even 20 years from now?  None of this stuff has been proven effective or economical enough to replace the accepted, widely-used power generation sources.

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Do you think a utility, when they want to expand on their power plant production fleet, is going to choose to build a landfill powered methane factory, which will be laiden with operational challenges and surprises being a first-of-its kind plant?

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They would much sooner choose a proven reactor design, or maybe, if they are feeling adventurous, go with a design that attempts to improve on some of those tried-and-true design features.

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Thermodynamic cycles have very real limiting factors, the only way to improve upon them is to link several together.  Aside from the concept of breeder reactors, they've already reached the upper limit of how much power you can get from a nuclear reactor

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At current usage levels, and with our current measured levels of world uranium resources, we have enough for 80 years of a once-through fuel cycle.  I put "current" in italics because as prices continue to rise, exploration increases and more is found.  The measured levels of uranium resources has increased by threefold since 1975.  With reprocessing and the use of breeder reactors, those 80 years can be extended much further.  A breeder reactor can witness a 50-fold increase in the utilization of uranium by operating on the abundant decay product, plutonium.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html

Westinghouse claims their AP1000 can be built in 36 months.  I'd say 4-5 years is more reasonable.  This was a problem in the industry years ago because of a faulty licensing process.  That has since been streamlined, which will avoid the delays that have caused construction setbacks and killed the bottom line of some utilities.

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I'm not arguing coal, we all know we can't rely on coal for the future so you should probably stop referencing it.

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No it isn't...they sit in the pool for 20 years then it's transported by truck or train to a repository...still decaying.  Remember the whole Yucca mountain thing?  Granted, those storage casks are pretty sturdy, but it's not all done on site.

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The mafia.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/09/italy.nuclearpower

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except for maintenance and repair

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What logistical problems are you referring to?  We have vast amounts of flat, windy space to build upon...and everyone who owns a house with a roof has ample capacity for solar power. 

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Besides the environmental impact of building the infrastructure, what else is there?  It sounds as if you're adverse to any infrastructure building if you're citing manufacturing and transportation impact.

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Did I mention hydrogen?  Knock it off with the straw man arguments.  Your bias is detracting from your ability to debate.  Your goal is to convince people, not throw as many stones as you can lay your hands on.

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    Therefore, it must be true and we will soon be replacing all of our electricity sources with windmills with rings.

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"Then everyone would be doing it"  Another strawman argument.  People are slow to change and you know it.

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Despite the vibrant development of renewable energy, nuclear power remains an irreplaceable choice for China to achieve the target of generating 15 percent of its electricity from non-fossil fuels by 2020, said Zhang. "We should take this crisis as an opportunity to catch up as the world's leading nuclear power country."

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BTW, got any more sources on your miracle windmills?

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I don't think it matters all that much if our countries (and their dwindling economies) are backing away from nuclear energy

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Obama was clear about a lot of things. But I don't see him printing money to start new plants.

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Obama's budget proposal for 2011 would add $36 billion in new federal loan guarantees to $18.5 billion already budgeted but not spent — for a total of $54.5 billion. The new $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees will go toward the construction and operation of a pair of reactors in Burke County, Ga., by Southern Co.

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