So you are saying it is OK to be totally disingenuous by constantly chanting "free market" and not be totally outraged that the government bailed out all of the pirates and gamblers?
Sounds like you completely missed my point. It shouldn't have happened in the first place and anyone who is chants free market and is honest should be outraged. If Rush Limbagh is going to use the phrase "free market" 100 times each show then I want total outrage when the government gets involved in *anything*. If not Limbagh and his devotees are just being totally disingenuous.
So lets confuse the issue by bringing up something totally different.
My response to the lament of "We have no plan for securing the waste!" is "We have no plan because we don't NEED a plan right now."
There are several schemes for storing nuclear waste: rocket it into the sun, vitrifying it (as you said) and dumping it into the Marianas Trench or a salt dome, bury it in the Saraha Desert, send it all to Detroit, etc.
Point is, we don't HAVE to make a decision today - we've got time. Between now and the time when a decision is required, a better solution may pop up, maybe a strain of bacteria that eats plutonium.
Would you have preferred that instead the govt allowed the entire financial system to collapse just to prove a point? Some of us learned lessons from the Great Depression, where the govt either did nothing or the wrong things. And if a bailout where the govt not only gets back ALL of the money it put on the line, but can actually wind up with a profit is the cost of avoiding a total disaster once every 80 years, I say it's worth it.
As for bailing out all of the pirates and gamblers, I think if you ask the investors that had stocks and bonds in the likes of GM, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc, they would tell you they lost all their investment. Theoretically, that should teach them to be more careful next time. Do I agree with everything the govt did with TARP in all cases? No. But in the end, given that we are getting ALL the money back, with a profit almost assured at this point, the "bailout" looks very smart.
And again, if Obama, who is no friend of capatilism and Eric Holder want to bring criminal charges against anyone, they are free to do so. The Bush administration brought plenty of them after the 2000 stock market collapse against the Enrons, Wcoms, Tycos etc. If they think they have such a great case, what are they waiting for? They found time to bring suit against the state of AZ, didn't they?
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It's not something totally different. Obama's $850bil stimulus is a good example of a similar size govt program taken to help the economy. An example of the typical, common, govt action that is taken not once every 80 years, but quite regularly and results in HUGE SPENDING that is never intended to be paid back and adds directly to the national debt. I see that is very different than the govt making a loan once in 80 years to save the economy that is paid back.
I think the issue of storing nuclear waste is a real and serious one. But.... on the other hand, the same crowd that is bitching about the nuclear waste is also tellling us that we'll have a worldwide calamity of biblical proportions in less than a hundred years from global warming if we continue to burn fossil fuels.
In which case, one would think that if they were sincere and intellectually honest, they would be all in favor of expanding nuclear power immediately. It's far from perfect, but with zero CO2 emissions, it looks pretty good to me. The environmental extremists position is kind of like a guy dying of thirst in the desert, refusing to drink some water that is available in a plastic bottle because it might have some trace amounts of bisphenol in it.
The reason for at least going ahead w/ Yucca Mtn (over Harry Reid's populist objections) is that the current spent fuel pools at all the plants are filling up (and have had to be expanded and storage compacted just to keep plants operational). They need more space and it's absolutely asinine to keep making more storage at all the individual plants for another 30 years or more. For one thing, these elements are aging and prone to developing cladding leakers, etc., that just causes more widespread contamination issues when scattered all over the map at the individual plants than if were consolidated in a location designed for the purpose.
On the other point going forward, I agree wholeheartedly. I've often said that the current filings of (last time I looked) 27 (+/-) licensing applications for new nuclear units on the NRC docket will smoke these turkeys out and reveal them for their real purposes. If they fight them indiscriminately as in the past on every possible basis they can dream up it will unveil them as primarily obstructionists irregardless of the environmental buzzwords.
AFAIRecall, Rush _was_ agin it from the git-go, saying GM should file bankruptcy to let them annul labor contracts unilaterally (altho I don't know enough labor/bankruptcy law detail to know if that was a legitimate answer or not).
OTOH, I'm pretty much free-market leaning meself and while don't listen to Rush much (he's far too repetitive for more than about 5 minutes at a time at the outside altho if can get lucky and get the satirical sections alone, they've got a pretty good chance of being a hoot if nothing else), it wasn't clear to me that on GM/Chrysler alone it was a good idea or not.
Unfortunately, we can't rerun the experiment and see how it would have turned out the other way for comparative purposes.
I don't see it alone as any different than Chrysler under Iacocca (sp?) years ago; it was confounded at the time by the rest of the financial happenings that weren't an issue then.
In short, I don't know whether it was better/worse than the alternative and there's no way to tell at this point. I can't believe bankruptcy would have been painless, though--how one could forecast reliably enough the effects is beyond my ken and I believe beyond any human capability to be able to have enough knowledge to know a priori the better overall action.
I'm of the opinion that the waste of today could be the fuel of tomorrow. Many years ago did anyone consider that a landfill would become an important source of fuel? :-)
Good points on Rush. I think you're right, that he was against the bailout at the time, so there isn't the alleged hypocrissy. Regarding GM, they in fact did go bankrupt with the stockholders losing everything. In that whole affair, the one part I thought was appalling was what happened to the bondholders. Under law, they should have been ahead of everyone, including the unions. Essentially, existing law was set aside and they got pennies on the dollar, which IMO was unconstitutional.
It could be but that's not the current working definition of "retrievable". One could do much less complex storage than the Yucca Mtn site and still recover the material for subsequent reprocessing.
Of course, political reasons have prevented any possibility of that in the US although at present prices and availability of U, there's no economic incentive anyway.
I didn't pay much attention to the actual details(+); I didn't think GM actually filed normal bankruptcy petition and went thru the regular process of reorganizational bankruptcy and that was what made for the bondholder treatment, etc., ...
(+) Wasn't anything _I_ could do about what was happening; didn't own any GM outside of mutual funds and none of them were so excessively overcommitted that whatever the fund managers decided on timing w/ GM wasn't going to make enough difference to change funds on the basis of what GM did or didn't do so I just pretty much ignored it at the time.
Han, your query/comment regarding that Gray County might be limited in production for other than wind availability spurred me to look at whether could find more amenable wind data than had had access to previously -- what thinketh thou on this? (I'm still amazed it's so strongly correlated even w/ the previous observations on the cyclic nature.)
Currently there are plans and prototypes of nuclear reactors that are
300 time more efficient than present design, safer, cheaper to build, waste only needs to be contained for 100 years instead of 1000s can use present waste for fuel. As a matter of fact these are the basically the same liquid metal designs that were originally touted back in the beginning of the nuclear program. We just know how to make them work now,
A small fraction of total so far, but yes in general concept. The HEU is being blended down to the much lower ( 3% U-235, a roughly typical max) fuel assembly enrichments for commercial reactors.
That's a pretty fair exaggeration of benefits possible... :)
3X a nominal 30% thermal efficiency would, indeed, be quite an advancement. :)
Liquid metal is still a tough coolant and quite unforgiving. I don't expect any full-scale implementations in my lifetime (which, altho the future expectancy ain't what it was when went to work putting Oconee-class reactor design to bed and licensing, hopefully it is still some time a'fore it's all over... :) )
I'm reminded of the fusion folks when I read the LMFBR booster stuff, unfortunately. "Just wait 20 years now and ..."
It's like a lot of things, I'm sure things like ore that was discarded in the past because it wasn't considered rich enough for older less efficient extraction processes will wind up being raw material for the future just like everything else we throw away.
dpb wrote in news:ijou3a$352$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:
I haven't been following the whole discussion (sorry). I really like the idea of wind energy, but, as has been pointed out before, storage is the big problem. Of course, more wind should indeed correlate with more wind energy being produced, if the demand is there.
Am watching the solar/wind/nuclear energy debate intensely. Need a good discussion of what is most efficient as baseline production vs supplying peak demand needs. With the climate going to be more extreme - both hot and cold - that'll be more and more necessary.
No clue what you're thinking of; there's more high-grade (as that goes) U ore than we could use at current rates in thousands of years even w/o recycling or the downblending of weapons-grade material.
It (the downblending) is more about the removal of the weapons material from stockpile than anything else altho the reduction in required additional SWUs for commercial fuel is a secondary benefit.
The former was the point -- even though the facility (in one of the most favorable practical locations on earth) only generates 40% of nameplate capacity on an annual basis, these data indicate it is wind limited that causes that, not an external factor (in which case there would be weak, if any correlation).
As far as what is most efficient as baseline again there's no question--any conventional source is owing to there not being the vagaries of the fuel source that plagues solar or wind.
None are of particular value for peaking; one needs a rapid response rate load-following source for that.
The best the alternatives can do is some conventional replacement, but there they still have the reliability issue that the conventional has to be around when they don't produce. Add to that that it took 2.5X the installed generation capacity of what is produced in wind and expenses are high on a per MWe basis even if the fuel cost is negligible.
As for the presumption of global climate, that is, imo, going to follow whatever natural cycle and variation has been going on for millennia.
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