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I would like to see all coal fired electric plants converted into nuclear fission plants with full fuel recycle to minimize waste production and storage costs. Properly designed nuclear plants can convert more non fissile material into nuclear fuel than they actually consume. These plants are safe, efficient and, compared to the environmental and health costs of coal and heavy oil plants, environmentally benign. The nuclear plants would handle the base load while wind and solar captured raw energy to be stored until needed. These should be combined and the necessary transmission lines built to serve the demand in other parts of the country. Nuclear energy and other alternates to coal and oil were deliberately killed by well executed propaganda campaign by the coal and oil industry.
I also think that coal should be used to make transportation fuel to offset our seemingly insatiable demand for natural petroleum fuels.
[color=black][font=Verdana]These plants are safe, efficient and, compared to the environmental and health costs of coal and heavy oil plants, environmentally benign.
Coal: Remove from ground (leave toxic tailings behind, and burn petroleum), burn (leave toxic ash and toxic gas), boil water (consume water).
Nuclear: Remove from ground (leave more toxic tailings behind, and burn petroleum), reduce ore (more tailings for reduction agents, byproducts), consume stainless steel (which is made with coal and things nastier), boil water (consume water), transport and store waste (burn petroleum).
Where's the more environmentally benign part again? I think I missed it.
Less SO2, NOx, Particulate and CO2 pollution. Also ability, if properly designed, to create more fissionable fuel than consumed. If necessary, and I think it will become so, they can supply the energy to conver coal into liquid transportation fuel.
The Fischer Tropsh process reacts the carbon in coal with water (steam) to form Methane and Carbon Monoxide. These can be processed into longer chain hydrocarbons as needed. The volatile hydrocarbons already in the coal are also recovered. This process was used to produce "Town Gas" in the 1800's for street and dwelling light as Cetacean (whale blubber) based oils were becoming very expensive. The discovery of petroleum oil initially provided kerosene for lights and was eventually replaced with electric lights.
Less SO2, NOx, Particulate and CO2 pollution. Also ability, if properly designed, to create more fissionable fuel than consumed. If necessary, and I think it will become so, they can supply the energy to conver coal into liquid transportation fuel.
Would like to see some numbers on that, considering coal plants (even the dirtier ones) have scrubbers to reduce those emissions, while refineries making "nuke-diesel" (diesel burned in the nuclear fuel cycle from ground-ground) generate those too, and mining equipment digging the pitchblende out of the ground are pretty dirty machines in their own right.
In any case, I think "environmentally benign" is being generous at best.
Compared with mining, transporting, burning and disposing of the ash anything is better than burning coal. If you want an example get a sensitive radiation counter and check for radiation at the boundry fence of a coal plant and a nuclear plant. You may be suprised.
Compared with mining, transporting, burning and disposing of the ash anything is better than burning coal. If you want an example get a sensitive radiation counter and check for radiation at the boundry fence of a coal plant and a nuclear plant. You may be suprised.
I think my point has been missed. Where nuclear fails to deliver on its promises of cleanliness and safety is in the extraction and conversion stages, not the reactor.
I would not expect to find any radiation readings at a nuclear plant, but I would very much expect to find high radiation readings at a uranium mine, and particularly one of the hundreds of abandoned ones in this country.
There's a lot more uranium and other radioactive elements in uranium mine ore and tailings than there is in fly ash. Further, Radon gas (natural uranium product) is the worst offender and it is not found in fly ash.
Radon IS one of the principal sources of radiation in coal fly ash because it is the daughter product of the uranium present in the ash. Mining, concentration, refining and enrichment of nuclear fuel is far less of a problem, even if individual sites have higher radiation levels, because far less nuclear fuel, in mass or volume, is required for each kW-Hr delivered.
I have done quite a bit of research on this topic and would like to continue our debate but I think we should start another thread.
To return to this topic - You know you are in NM when - you can get on a tour of a place where a nuclear weapon was detonated. I have not been there but the pictures indicate that it looks pretty much like any other piece of nearby desert.
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