au_rick said...
Nuclear huh ?
Is uranium not also a finite resource (like coal or oil) ??
Wind power would actually seem to be the more sensible for a sustainable future, as the solar panles are also made from a finite resource and cost a sh!t load to produce, as well as create a whole lot of pollution in the process.
Yes, Uranium is a finite resource and there is not a lot of it.
However, even with the known reserves and the old 3rd generation reactors it is sufficient to give us 30 to 50 years of power.
There is probably a huge ammount of undiscovered reserves because since the market has been choked off by bad press and protest, almost nobody bothers to look for it.
Fortunately, due to an inate desire to blow our planet to smithereens back in the 1950s to 1990, we now have a ready made highly refined source of uranium in the form of the ICBM warheads which are now being recycled into uranium to run power stations.
It seem that holding sufficient nuclear bombs to blow the world apart 100 times over has finally been recognised as a slight overkill and a large proportion of the misile warheads are now destined to be recycled for peaceful purposes.
I can't remember how long this will power the present reactors but I think it might be around 30 years.
That's just if we stick with the present nuclear reactor technology.
There is a 4th generation design which they say can use the spent fuel from the 3rd gen. reactors and with this technology the reactors can get about 10 times the power from the same amount of uranium.
It was also said that with this technology there is enough uranium already mined and in stock to provide the world power requirements for most of this century.
This should be more than enough time to get fusion reactors up and running.
If not, they can start mining it again and give us another 200 years.
The problem has been that with all the bad press and protests regarding the use of nuclear fuel for any purpose at all, the technology development was choked off soon after birth so we are still fuddling around with technology which is now 20 to 30 years behind where it should be by now.
The decision to go down this path of power generation by good old safe, clean and secure coal and oil fired power stations has now turned around and is biting us in the bum.
If the politicians had thought ahead further than the next election it should have been obvious that it one day would, but I guess they were happy so long as it didn't come home to roost on their watch. They were right it didn't.
However, that particular chicken has now come home to roost and is circling overhead with a 30 year case of chronic constipation, just looking for somewhere to dump it.
So what are we doing about it?
We are running around looking for umbrellas in the form of a few megawatts of wind power or solar power or wave power when the need is for gigawatts.
Wind, solar and wave are just not going to cut the mustard.
We either turn off the 3000 watt aircons, 500 watt plasma tvs, 300 watt computers, (hang on, i'll just finnish this first.
) or we initiate a changeover to a power source which can reliably provide that sort of energy output without gassing the planet with its exhaust.
And at the moment that has to be nuclear fission reactors because that's all we've got.
In the future it will be clean, pollution free nuclear fusion reactors which we do not yet have because no one will put up the cash for developement.
That is very short sighted.
) our panels make about 1-2kwh!
