I just received a notice from California Edison that Tier 3, 4 and 5 rates are increasing AGAIN in the first quarter of 2009. My electric bill is typically $400 a month. I don't think very many people fall into Tier 1 or
Here's what really pisses me off: the electric utilities fail to take advantage of clean nuclear power. They keep wasting our money on natural gas, wind power, and all kinds of inefficient "green" ideas but they are blind to nuclear power. If we had nuclear power we'd only be paying a fraction of the price and it would be good for the environment!!
When I lived in California I spent very little time inside. Although rates (per KWH) were very high, my bill was reasonable unless I used the electric ceiling heat. I now used 5X that amount, but I'm in a much larger house and rates are lower.
Nuclear energy is "green", both safe and non polluting and given proper reprocessing, largely renewable.
Nuclear is also the only source that is currently viable at the scale necessary to eliminate coal and nat gas fueled generation, and further to provide subsidized charging electricity for electric/hybrid vehicles to further reduce oil consumption.
Nuclear is the only viable intermediate source that can allow a significant shift away from fossil fuels *now* while the technologies for other sources such as solar, wind, hydro and tidal develop further to overcome the significant issues they currently have, largely the utility scale energy storage capabilities required given the intermittent generation of most of those sources.
I seem to recall that back in the Carter or Regan era there was an attempt to build a fission plant in some mid-western state and the Lawyer costs on both sides ran way more than the cost of actually building the electrical plant. CBS's 60 minutes did a massive hatchet job on the building plans for that power plant.
Teachers in grade school and middle school were teaching the evils of fission power for generation of electrical power at this time. One teacher tried to organize a class room writing exercises asking the power plant not be build. (IIRC, I think this occurred in Madison, Wisconsin but the plant was in another state, maybe Illinois)
Any discussion on the nuclear fission (boiling water by splitting heavy atoms) *must* include cost of lawyers, cost anti-nuke media counter- attacks by "Press-Spokespersons," and cost of lobbyist at the Federal, State, and local levels. very $$$$$
You think your cost of electricity is high now? Just wait until the lawyer's invoice from at least 1/3 of the lawyers in the San Francisco Bay area comes in.
"Pete C." wrote in news:4937ecba$0$24426$ snipped-for-privacy@unlimited.usenetmonster.com:
plus you have to remember that the greenies are against dams, so that kills hydropower,and they are against windmills because they kill birds. They also are against the power lines necessary to distribute the electric power from remote windfarms.(or any other power generating source...)
Their concept is that you DO WITHOUT;Reduce your lifestyle.
Meanwhile Russia,Iran,Venezuela,other countries all are proceeding with new nuclear powerplants.
No decision has been made on the disposal of nuclear waste because a decision is not yet necessary!
There are several seemingly-excellent disposal techniques: Imbedding the waste in molten glass and sinking the ingots in the Marinaras Trench, shooting the waste into the sun, pumping the stuff into abandonded salt mines, yak-yak-yak. There is almost no end to possible fixes.
Until we HAVE to make a decision, it is best to DELAY the decision on the chance a better solution will present itself.
Suppose, for example, the glass-ingot method were put into play. Then, ten years from now, somebody discovers you can turn radioactive material into burgers and feed the world. Can you imagine the effort and treasure necessary to retrieve all those ingots from five miles under water? If, on the other hand, we had shot the waste into the sun, we'd NEVER be able to get it back (unless we went at night).
Of all the forms of power generation, hydroelectric is the most hazardous. Dams seldom fail, but when they do, they fail catastrophically!
Every time someone starts ranting about extreme conservation, getting back to a simpler time, the integrity of the "noble savage" lifestyle, and being "at one" with nature, I have but one word:
Greenies throw up any smoke screen they can think of. I remember a big objection here was heat from reactor would raise water temperature and hurt the fishies. Now, a few decades later, the same people are crying about pollution from the big coal generator we have, which would have never been needed if we got the nuke plant ;(
Yes and no on the "anti" movement. What it did do in conjunction w/ the ill-informed popular press and an even more sadly informed former president was to change the political climate. The actual final straw was, of course, the TMI incident which was totally mischaracterized in every report outside the technical community itself.
The economics were only so bad in that time frame owing to the ability of the obstructionists to stretch out the licensing and construction process to such extremes as they did(1) and the excessively high interest rates of the time so that the financing until the unit could become a revenue-generator became intolerable. That was a combination of effects part of which can certainly be attributed to the movement.
The waste issue is not resolved for political reasons far more than for technical ones. The former president of whom we just spake edict'ed no reprocessing licensing to go forward in the US and began the storage option instead fiasco which led to the current Yucca Mountain debacle which the Senator from NV has used as a populist campaign crutch for almost 30 years now.
(1) The problems are far too complex to delve into in depth in this type of a forum, but the NRC bears a fair responsibility as well in its insatiable demands for every possible new gizmo or rule to be retrofit to every existing plant that kept design criteria in a constant state of flux. And, of course, as I noted upthread, there were mistakes made by the utilities and architect-engineer firms that exacerbated the problems by not being as careful as should have been in crossing every i and dotting ever t. Then, of course, the protestors used every one of these details, no matter how trivial, as a club to the fullest extent they could manage.
I believe there are safe ways to dispose of it but until a valid plan is in place to do so, we have no damn business creating yet more waste. Right now, there is nothing but stockpiling the stuff in holding areas that are an ever increasing hazard to everyone. Find a solution, prove it, implement it and then lets talk about building new facilities. Until then, NO!
The plan is to NOT dispose of the stuff until we HAVE to dispose of the stuff. At the moment we can no longer safely store the waste, we'll pick from competing alternatives. Until then, it is prudent and responsible to wait for any alternative methods that haven't yet made it to the party.
NOT disposing of nuclear waste is far preferable to disposing of it the wrong way.
They raised the same objection about a NG-powered generating plant here. The heated water (which travels about a mile through a canal to the bay) would kill every living marine animal from Galveston to Mexico!
Turns out, the animals are not stupid! Those that don't like warm water go elsewhere. Those that DO like warm water (i.e., shrimp) migrate to the discharge canal. Those that like the things that like warm water (i.e., redfish) follow the shrimp and the fishermen follow them. Somedays it's shoulder-to-shoulder along the banks of the canal!
I'm not a "greenie", I'm just a person who would like to conserve supplies of food, water and fuel for future generations. The "fishies" are badly depleted in many places ... cod in Atlantic, grouper and others in Florida, from overfishing. Dams in the northwest have harmed fisheries, as has drought ..... downstream is much of California and the desert S.W. Ethanol was great until it disturbed food markets, and it consumes huge amounts of water, which is a big problem for SE and Florida.
Someone said we should just keep the nuclear waste until we develop technology to make it safe..........nukes take fuel, too.
Unfortunately, we need the power now and the problem to be solved is primarily political, not technical.
As noted upthread, Reid has been using Yucca Mountain as his own personal populist whipping boy to his personal advantage for nearly 30 years. Once it does finally open and we can move stuff from the spent fuel pools, there really is no crisis as far as ultimate disposal by whatever means is finally allowed. Again, that will primarily be a political, not technical decision.
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