The Lesser Evil: Nuclear or Coal?
seedmagazine.com
seedmagazine.com
I knew nuclear had a higher density, but wow, that's a pretty striking way to put that information into perspective. I understand all the fears of accidents, terrorist attacks, etc... but if your goal is to curb CO2, it certainly looks like an option worth considering.
Increasing nuclear plant safety seems like a more tractable engineering problem than figuring out how to keep CO2 out of the environment after you've liberated it from tons and tons of coal.
Also, lots of things are radioactive, but they may not be pure enough to be useful unless enriched further. You could probably enrich it, but at this juncture it is probably cheaper to simply get new fuel than to reprocess waste.
Just my two cents.
This way you end up with huge quantities of waste that may indeed be slightly harmful, but are in no way radioactive enough to be reused as fuel. This is mostly where the "tons" of waste come from.
Although obviously a political impossibility, a safe way to deal with it would be to pulverize it and spread it evenly throughout our national parks. This would not even measurably increase the radiation level above the background level.
Steven Chu sounds like an interesting guy. We'll see what happens.
As a side note: Why do they feel it's nessisary or even reasonable to find people with strong vested intrests when looking at these topics?
researches capture and storage of flue gas CO2 and other fugitive gases
studies clean coal at the University of Queensland.
is a novelist, writer, and former fiction editor at The New Yorker.He's got a great FAQ on Nuclear Power, and it's incredibly convincing:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html
The article shoves these aside with an 'we currently can not make the required quantities using these technologies so we have to choose between coal and nuclear'.
The problem is not to switch to coal or nuclear today though. So let's keep those windfarms coming, better and lower priced solar cells and let's see what other truely renewable energy sources we can find.
Then let's solve the remainder as much as we can by burning waste rather than nuclear power or coal.
However just like when the oil companies researched, patented and never sold oil additives that would have made petrol (gas) go further (not a conspiracy :) my Aunt was a research chemist for one company) purely to secure their market they are doing similar things with solar tech; lobbying and hiding it :) we worked on a small project at the end of my degree for an energy company I shall not name - they were actively patenting advances in solar tech "for a rainy day" :)
Fair play - no one else bothered to beat them too it. But it does suck.