Following our nuclear star

[The Big Dog]

The Sierra Club came out the other day and pronounced that they were opposed to any new nuclear power in California. Since we know they also oppose any new hydro-electric projects (can't put up any damned old dam now can we?) one is left to wonder just what can replace coal, particularly here in California.

Following our nuclear star

[/url]
A Christmas Eve walk through a forest in 1938 gave us the gift of clean energy.

By Charles L. Harper Jr.
December 24, 2008
The Los Angeles Times

On Christmas eve in 1938, the physicist Lise Meitner took a walk in the snowy woods of Kungalv, Sweden, with her nephew, Otto Frisch, also a physicist. A Jewish refugee who had recently escaped from Hitler's Germany, Meitner began discussing with Frisch some puzzling experimental results from a lab in Berlin.

By the time their famous walk was over, Meitner had scribbled down for the first time the equations that demonstrated the possibility of extracting huge amounts of energy from the splitting or "fission" of uranium atoms. Seventy years ago today, the woman whom Albert Einstein called "our Madame Curie" ushered us into the nuclear age.

<< snipped >>

The French have been using nuclear energy for decades, with few safety problems and no carbon footprint. Expanding America's already well-established and impressively safe nuclear-power capacity by a factor of roughly 15 (to put us on a par with France) would allow us to make a relatively quick transition to energy security and to much-lower greenhouse gas emissions.[/quote]

[subdjoe]

OK, nukes are out because Nukes-r-EEEEEvil.

coal is out because Coal-r-Dirty & EEEEvil

dams are out because Dam(n)s-r-EEEEvil and Bad-4-rivers

wind turbines are out because those nasty blades kill birds, plus the need to run transmission lines through new areas, and they may also be used to carry electricity genereated in EEEEvil Nuke or Coal plants.

solar is out because of the need for the raping pristine areas to erect massive solar farms, and then there is the problem with the transmission lines.

Doesn't leave a whole lot, does it?

[The Big Dog]

Considering that "they" don't want us to burn wood in our fireplaces...... no, that doesn't leave much at all.

[jgaffney]

The Sierra Club has a fact sheet on their website regarding nuclear power. Here's a summary of the main points:

• Nuclear power is expensive.
  And, solar isn't?
  
  
• Nuclear power produces radioactive waste.
  Why is this a showstopper in the US, but nowhere else? Why can't we apply the technology to solve that portion of the puzzle?
  
  
• Nuclear power is dangerous.
  See my comment above.
  
  
• Nuclear power will not solve global warming.
  Because we can't build the reactors fast enough. As if we will "solve" global warming on schedule.
  
  
• Nuclear power produces global warming emissions.
  From mining uranium and disposing of waste. But, CFL's don't?
  
  
• Nuclear power undermines nonproliferation efforts.
  That's a political issue, not an energy issue. Anyways, look how well it has worked in the last 20 years.

The dreamers at the Sierra Club think that we will magically emerge into a non-carbon future in the next 20 to 30 years, with no pain to society - at least, no pain to them - at all.

[ferrous]

Maybe the energy from Hot Air generated by our politicians could be harnessed into Tesla coils (Nikola Tesla really was a man before his or our time) and sent out to receivers by wireless transmission? No, I'm sure environmentalists would find the EMF's harmful in some ways.

Since this concept would certainly be shot down by the tree huggers, maybe the hot air generated by government employees could be captured in their buildings and used, just to warm and generate electricity by co-generation units? Portable packs could be issued to traveling politicians to capture any and all of the hot air given off by them in their visits and speeches.

[subdjoe]

Gaff, thanks for mentioning CFLs - just a reminder to you folks - you can't throw CFLs into the trash, they are HazMat. You must take them to a proper recycle center. If you break one in your house, ventilate it well, put on your Tyvek overalls, carefully sweep up all the Hg containing fragments, put them in a plastic bag (ziplocks work) for proper disposal. If you put them in a plastic or metal trash can, the Hg will contaminat that, and will need to be disposed of. Remember to bag your broom and dustpan too since they are now HazMat.

If you have a business that is open to the public and a fluorescent breaks, remember that you need to evacuate the building and call in a professional HazMat team for clean up if you want to comply with the law.

[moondog]

It seems all the Sierra Club supports now is the converting of our food belt into our fuel belt. Bio-fuel is not the answer. You cannot feed the nation and power it from the same fields.

[moondog]

Nikola Tesla or Никола Тесла was a very intelligent man. Did you see the Prestige?

[The Big Dog]

There are those who say that on this subject the Sierra Club is in the pocket of Big Coal, and maybe there is some truth to that.

However what is inescapeable is that there are only a few forms of generation technology which can economically produce the vast amounts of power our modern society requires:

** Coal
** Hydro
** Nuclear

All the popular and PC alternatives, most specifically wind and solar, use far too much land to generate fractions of the requirement. Those alternatives are solid for local, down to the individual home level, needs but they are utterly incapable of serving any level of magnitude such as exists in California by themselves.

Geothermal is a good potential alternative, but it is geographically limited and we've seen just how much of a steeenkin' beeee-yotch it has been to put in place a system to replenish the resource with clean, treated wastewater.