O'Reilly interviews Obama, part 4

[flyingimam]

Yeah you got a point about beck, as for launching missiles full of nucleur waste we probably should find a way to keep the shuttle from blowing up first. Last thing you want to do is spread the stuff halfway around the world.

shuttles are different. they are hauled into space. they are old technology. when was the last shuttle designed/built?

but how many ballistic missiles have u heard to blow up by themselves while on their way to target... same missiles can go directly up out of earth's gravity zone and float their way towards sun... its only a matter of how much payload 1 can carry to be economical, which i think is really not much of a problem counting these missiles can actually use the same shit they are carrying to space as fuel!

[andruejaysin]

Ballistic missles are not powered by nuclear waste or nucleur fuel for that matter. A nucleur rocket is possible in theory, but that's something for the distant future to carry people to the stars, certainly not for launching from earth. How often do they explode? IDK, not something the air force is gonna talk about if they don't have to.

[Reefer Rogue]

Lol Bill was actually amusing in that one. I wanna see that bball game

Overall, i think Obama performed well in his 4 interviews.

[khronik]

Because of all the nuclear plants in Illinois, it would be really hard for Obama to be against nuclear energy. But anyway...

Since coal is expensive to transport, especially with these high oil costs, in some areas with no nearby coal mines nuclear energy is cheaper. The main problem is that all the red tape makes it extremely difficult to build plants.

Cost Comparison - Nuclear vs. Coal

Nuclear waste is fairly dangerous, but if you put it through a breeder reactor, the resulting waste from that isn't nearly as long-lived. Shooting it into space would cost way more than would be worth it. Storing it deep underground in a dry area is safe, but since the waste is dangerous for at least a million years, global weather patterns could change before then. Yucca Mountain was held up because congress said it had to be safe for a million years. Still, I think that a facility that can store waste for a thousand years would be plenty. If we don't have the technology to do something about it before then, we have a lot more than a nuclear waste repository to worry about.

One possibility of disposing nuclear waste is actually pretty cool. What they'd to is bury it in a subduction zone, which is where part of the earth's crust is forced under another part. If you bury it there, the waste only needs to stay sealed for a few thousand years, and then it's forced deep inside the earth.

Wind energy costs about twice as much as coal/nuclear, as does natural gas. Solar energy costs about five times what coal/nuclear does. Also, solar and wind energy can't increase production to meet demand, so they at least need something else to supplement them.

Ultimately, I think our goals for power generation should be nuclear fusion and geothermal energy. Massive amounts of energy can be extracted from either one, and both are very safe. The only problem is, nuclear fusion is so hard to get going and keep going. That's actually kind of a good thing though because if there's a plant failure, the reaction just stops. And the end result is just helium, which isn't radioactive at all.

[dragonrider]

A lot of the waste from nuclear energy is not just the spent fuel, it's the waste from radioactive parts of the power plant itself. The spent fuel is the most dangersous, but a lot of it can be reprocessed. But a lot of it is radioactive steal, concrete, etc. that the power plant is made out of. The highly radioactive conditions in the core of the reactor make everything inside the reactor extremely radioactive. They also make the core deteriorate quickly, so it needs to be replaced. You might get a ton of spent fuel and maybe 10 or 100 tons of other material (I hae no idea how much, really).

And this problem of having the radioactive material from the power plant itself will also be an issue for fusion, if they can ever actually make fusion work for power generation. When fusing hydrogen, most of the energy is released as high-speed neutrons. Those need to be captured in a material to make the heat for power generation. That materail will quickly become radioactive. So the spent fuel is harmless helium, but there are still tons and tons of radioactive material to deal with.

The Yucca mountain idea is one way to handle it, the subduction zone idea is another. The French store it all above ground in special facilities. The idea is that they want to be able to monitor it and correct any leaks or other problems easily. If you put it inside a mountain and something happens, the whole confined environment becomes so dangerous, you might never be able to get in and fix it. If you put it into a suduction zone, and it begins to leak before its 1000 years is up, you propably never could get in to correct it.

I think wind and solar are the way to go. It is not cost effective now, but its cost goes down all the time, and the cost of fossil fuels goes up. Eventually they will be the same. But if you could quanitify the cost of the pollution involved with fossil fuels, wind and solar would probably already be cheaper.

[Psycho4Bud]

A lot of the waste from nuclear energy is not just the spent fuel.

You don't know the half of it. Replacement parts for ANY part of the facility is dictated through the government and of course they have their favorite vendors which "handle" these parts. They have a yearly replacement program on critical parts that are high cost and others that shouldn't be but are because of price gouging.

I worked outside industrial sales for over 11 years and had the pleasure to convert a customer from Nebraska to my company. A seal kit that I sold for $750 NET pricing was being sold to the facility for $5000; likewise the full pump unit that I sold for $3,500 NET was being purchased for over $20,000. The company, vendor? G.E., making your life better!

McCain is for nuclear power under the current status; Obama under more strict controls. Either way, they'd better think about cleaning up the system before sticking a bunch of tax payers $'s into it.

Have a good one!:s4:

[dragonrider]

You don't know the half of it. Replacement parts for ANY part of the facility is dictated through the government and of course they have their favorite vendors which "handle" these parts. They have a yearly replacement program on critical parts that are high cost and others that shouldn't be but are because of price gouging.

I worked outside industrial sales for over 11 years and had the pleasure to convert a customer from Nebraska to my company. A seal kit that I sold for $750 NET pricing was being sold to the facility for $5000; likewise the full pump unit that I sold for $3,500 NET was being purchased for over $20,000. The company, vendor? G.E., making your life better!

McCain is for nuclear power under the current status; Obama under more strict controls. Either way, they'd better think about cleaning up the system before sticking a bunch of tax payers $'s into it.

Have a good one!:s4:

Well there is radiactive waste and there is bureacratic waste. Maybe we should just wrap the nuclear waste in $100 bills and dump both into a subduction zone where they will be pulled into the earth's core.

[TheMetal1]

Good information everyone. Never would have thought I could learn so much about the nuclear power industry from this thread :stoned:

This is the second thread I have seen regarding the upcoming election that has been side-tracked into a science/physics discussion in a week :thumbsup: Sweeeeeeeeeet :hippy:

And yeah... P4B... that's some pretty sweet pro-active part replacement happening there. I love swapping out parts with virtually no signs of wear... "just because." Can't argue with results though, right?

(looks down the hole that money gets thrown into)

If only I could go down there and get some of it... (leans over)... Oh shit... (slips)... NOOOOOOOO........ (THUD)...... woah, I found my lighter! :rasta:

[khronik]

And this problem of having the radioactive material from the power plant itself will also be an issue for fusion, if they can ever actually make fusion work for power generation. When fusing hydrogen, most of the energy is released as high-speed neutrons. Those need to be captured in a material to make the heat for power generation. That materail will quickly become radioactive. So the spent fuel is harmless helium, but there are still tons and tons of radioactive material to deal with.

Yeah, I was going to touch on this but my post was already long enough as it was. They didn't take radioactive contamination into consideration when they were building the first and second generation of nuclear power plants, but now they're definitely looking at that. One thing they're doing is developing new alloys that absorb neutrons but don't transmute into radioactive isotopes with long half-lives. They can use these alloys in areas where neutron radiation levels are high. Even though these alloys don't produce long-lived radioactive isotopes, they often break down into elements that have a negative impact on properties of the alloy, so they would need to be replaced, but they wouldn't need to be classified as radioactive waste.

The Yucca mountain idea is one way to handle it, the subduction zone idea is another. The French store it all above ground in special facilities. The idea is that they want to be able to monitor it and correct any leaks or other problems easily. If you put it inside a mountain and something happens, the whole confined environment becomes so dangerous, you might never be able to get in and fix it. If you put it into a suduction zone, and it begins to leak before its 1000 years is up, you propably never could get in to correct it.

Engineers are still pretty good at designing these things, and even if it did leak it'd be way underground far below groundwater levels. As long as it stays there, no problem, at least in the subduction zones. Another thing they can do is mix it in with glass. That way, you can smash it all up and the waste still won't leak out. The main problem with subduction zones is that the people that live in those areas still don't want nuclear waste anywhere near them. (Not in my backyard!)

I think wind and solar are the way to go. It is not cost effective now, but its cost goes down all the time, and the cost of fossil fuels goes up. Eventually they will be the same. But if you could quanitify the cost of the pollution involved with fossil fuels, wind and solar would probably already be cheaper.

One issue is that wind is most active in the morning and evening, and solar cuts out at night. Also, solar panels are expensive and require manufacturing processes that produce lots of pollution. But presumably if we got really cool nanotech, we could solve that problem. I wrote a short sci-fi story for a writing class in college in which all roads and parking lots were made out of a self-repairing organic substance that also collected solar energy. I still think that would be awesome.