Posted by unregistered user at 3/10/08 7:40 p.m.

Nuclear power doesn't come from the Sun. None of the Sun's power made the uranium used in nuclear fuel. The uranium is much much older (by a few billion years at least) than the Sun. It existed in the misty pre solar system. The uranium energy comes from same source of energy that the Sun does: whatever larger star was here before the Sun and/or the big bang.

Posted by Green Party at 3/10/08 8:54 p.m.

Nuclear power couldn't be dirtier, and it's hard to imagine that it could be more expensive.

Nuclear power has only a track record of transferring massive wealth from the Public to shareholders, and of being unable to dispose of its highly poisonous waste which lasts millions of years, requiring the government to fund the astronomical disposal costs, again at taxpayer expense.

Posted by unregistered user at 3/10/08 9:12 p.m.

Poor Green Party, nuclear power has a traffic of transferring massive wealth from the public to its shareholders (the public) but so does every other successful company. There's this thing called capitalism.

And the waste disposal is completely paid for by a tax on nuclear power, not by general taxes. Try to take a tour of a nuclear plant, it is very clean. It is refueled every 2 years so there is minimal mining involved. I wish I could refuel my car only every 2 years.

Posted by Green Party at 3/11/08 5:52 a.m.

Apparently you don't have any college, #106877/#106907.

No, there's a difference between siphoning off financial resources... and providing value. I am not going into much detail because you're not worth it, but when the true costs far outstrip the benefit of an enterprise, it's an economic inefficiency which puts a drag on an economy, and by definition is abusive of the financial system.

And no, the waste disposal is not even remotely covered by the paltry fees charged as a result of corruption of regulators by the nuclear industry. You have no idea what Yucca Maountain is, much less how much it costs. You think the plants are spic 'n span, and the spent fuel is all taken care of, when it has been getting stockpiled for 30 years since they haven't known what to actually do with it!

I hope you're not allowed to vote #106877/#106907, because you are unqualified.

Posted by unregistered user at 3/11/08 8:25 a.m.

The waste tax is 1 mil/kWhr. You can look up nuclear production on the eia.doe.gov website. Multiplying the tax out by the production, you get $17 billion dollars through 2006. That money has not been sitting in a box, it should be collecting interest so at lets just say 5% ROR, that would come out to be over $34 billion. Now if you add in the fact that utilities are giving the government spent fuel where 99% of the energy is reusable, the government may have made a very good investment.

I wouldn't recommend it, but you could fit all the waste from 30 years of operation of a nuclear plant in one small house if you split up the waste to optimize space.

The new nuclear power question is a simple one. The baseload power plants in this country are old and need to be replaced. You can choose coal or nuclear for baseload power. I would rather have the waste in a solid form placed in a box in the middle of nowhere, than breathe in the nasty stuff every day like we do with coal power plants.

Posted by Ricardo Parker at 3/11/08 12:06 p.m.

"Nuclear power doesn't come from the Sun. None of the Sun's power made the uranium used in nuclear fuel. The uranium is much much older (by a few billion years at least) than the Sun. It existed in the misty pre solar system. The uranium energy comes from same source of energy that the Sun does: whatever larger star was here before the Sun and/or the big bang."

Ricardo sez:

I know little about Nuclear Power because I haven't researched it enough - this is because I have had little interest in learning about a source of energy that is dirty and non-renewable.

So I can't refute what you're saying and I'll state just this:

We use oil to extract and process uranium. I suppose we could use coal when there's no more oil. This doesn't sound like a good way to go, though.

I have heard people talk about "clean nuclear", but that sounds like an oxymoron. I'll search for more articles that can explain "clean nuclear" but so far I haven't found anything.

I think we have the ability to build nuclear plants that are "safe". But I don't trust that nuclear power of any kind can be clean, by simple definition. And here's the main caveat: a country can just turn the switch and use nuclear energy to build weapons of mass destruction. The US will not be able to maintain nuclear power while keeping other countries from pursuing the same alternatives - not in the long run, for sure. I'd much rather see all nations relying on renewable energy such as PVs and Windmills than run the risk of having some nations using nuclear power "because they feel they have the right to". A "right" that comes from the fact that the US has chosen to pursue nuclear power generation (if that becomes the case).

Despite the loss in supremacy that the US has had in the past few years, this country is still the world leader in many ways, and most other nations still follow us (although Germany and Japan have become leaders in the renewable energy sector). We do not want to lead the world in the pursuit of nuclear energy - I certainly hope we don't go in that direction!

Thanks for the insight on Uranium - I need/want to learn more about nuclear power generation.

Posted by unregistered user at 3/11/08 12:55 p.m.

Ricardo, your comments are spot on. Google GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership). As many things as Bush has messed up on, he might have a winner here.

He recognizes that the world is going for nuclear power and that it can be dangerous, so GNEP is about selling the rest of the world fuel and then taking it back for recycling so the other countries can't try to make bombs even if they wanted to. Might be a good idea, might not but whether we do nuclear or not, the rest of world certainly will.

Posted by unregistered user at 3/11/08 12:59 p.m.

You are correct it takes energy for the uranium to be mined just like it does for any other source of energy including wind (steel making) and solar (silicon production). But when one pellet smaller than your thumb is equivalent to a train full of coal, its looking very clean to me.

Posted by Green Party at 3/11/08 8:22 p.m.

Eh, one nuclear power plant produces a ton of highly radioactive nuclear waste each YEAR. And how many nuclear power plants are there in the US? And how many years have they been operating? As of 2003, the United States had accumulated about 80,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors! The EPA says that after only 10,000 years of radioactive decay, the spent nuclear fuel will no longer pose a threat to public health and safety.

True, the amount of waste could be reduced with reprocessing, but they are not doing that. Even if reprocessed, the remaining waste will be substantially radioactive for at least 300 years even if the actinides are removed, and for up to thousands of years if the actinides are left in. And reprocessing contaminates a whole new generation of materials, and generates fissionable material which could be used in bombs. Further, reprocessing itself has its critics, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, who are the most highly educated specialists in the world.

Already more than 80,000 tons of highly radioactive waste sits in cooling pools next to the 103 US nuclear power plants, awaiting transportation to a storage facility yet to be found. This dangerous material will be an attractive target for terrorist sabotage as it travels through 39 states on roads and railway lines for the next 25 years. Even keeping track of it all has proved to be a problem. In fact fears have been expressed that terrorists could gain control of some of it to make "dirty bombs" (such attempts have been made in Russia, unsuccessfully to date) or, if reprocessing were ever instituted in the U.S., perhaps even a nuclear device.

You are making things up when you say,
"The waste tax is 1 mil/kWhr."
You have no idea what a kWH is. We pay 3.8 cents per kWH here in Seattle! LOL That is quite a waste tax!

According to EIA, only $8bb has been collected over 30 years for the waste tax! Do you have any idea how much Yucca Mountain costs? $58bb if completed today, and taxpayers must pay that. Not only that, but because the federal government has been corrupted by Big Energy, we have had to pay the utilities between $300 and $500 million per year in compensation for failing to comply with the contract the government signed to take the spent nuclear fuel by 1998.

Yeah, what a deal...

There's alot more, but it's not worth it trying to convince conservatives of anything. Facts and science are not important to you. What's important to you is never looking like you are wrong. So keep boxing those shadows. Your fantasies have no value in the real world.

Posted by unregistered user at 3/13/08 9:16 p.m.

A mil is a engineering term for .1% (as in milli). The tax is a tenth of a cent per kWh or one milli-dollar per kWhr. Since apparently only $8 billion has been collected, obviously the numbers don't match because the tax wasn't applied retroactively.

Fast reactors that recycle spent nuclear fuel are on the way. I am not worried about American corporations breaking laws to make nuclear weapons.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is nothing more than a political organization of "scientists" who think they know more than everybody else. Remember scientists do theory, engineers take the science and make something useful out of them.

Also I think you will find that Barak Obama to be very favorable to nuclear power, I wouldn't call him a conservative.