The magnitude of the problem is not the issue. The Yucca mountain facility is plenty large (or could be made plenty large) to deal with 10 to 20 times the waste we have. We could shut down every nuclear plant tomorrow and we will still need to build facility that will have to me monitored and avoided for several centuries. We are only talking about tripling the problem by replacing all of the coal fired plants with nuclear ones. What is the preferred solution, having the nuclear waste problem AND the problem of green house gases from coal fired plants or just having the nuclear waste problem? I'd rather just have the waste problem.

Eventually solar thermal and wind power will be the only source of our electric power. Because the source of power is intermittent, they cannot provide a significant fraction of our electric power until inexpensive methods to store the electric energy they generate are developed. Development of solar and wind technology and storage methods should be pursued vigorously but until these technologies can be brought on line we HAVE to generate our electricity from nuclear power.

Storage technology isn't that hard. First off, electric loads tend to be lightest during the night since most people are sleeping. This would change a little during northern winters if we went to electric heating, but even so, with controlled pricing you could easily induce people to run cool houses during the night (you can by a thermostat at Home Depot that does that today for less than $50).

Hydro used to be thought of as environmentally sound because it generated huge amounts of power for relatively small drops in water ( Hydro power is given as

net head [(feet) × flow (gpm)] ÷ 10 = W

So if we raise a gallon of water 500' every minute, we get roughly 50 Watts/Minute or 3kWatts/hr

The Glen Canyon dam flushes 15 Million Gallons/minute to generate 1.3 Megawatts for a 580' drop. Now remember we don't need to generate that sort of power all the time, we just need to generate it at night. The average household uses 0.8kWh/day so lets cut that in half for the night so we need 0.4kWh.

So 1gpm raised 500' would power 7.5 households at night. So lets round down to 7. And lop off anouther 2Kwh because of mechanical inefficiencies in the system.

So for a million households (ie a region like metropolitan Seattle, we need 200,000Gpm raised 500', Averaged for 12hrs, so thats 200,000x60x12 = 14,400,000 gallons or roughly 44 Acre Feet. So if the holding pond we build is 50' deep, then we need less than 2 acres of surface area (Elevated pond, lower pond) That's not a hell of a lot of space.

If you generate hydrogen or pump water to store electricity you pretty much triple your electricity costs right off the bat. You lose about half the energy in the storage (pumping the water or creating hydrogen from water) and reuse cycle. In addition you have to build and maintain the facilites to store the energy from wind and electric and reuse it. I'm sure someday we will be able to reduce the cost of the technologies to make them palatable but right now all of this stuff is in the development stage and not ready for prime time. IN addition we need solutions that countries like China and India will agree too because they are going to be the biggest coal users in the next 20 years. Nuclear in my mind will be the only way we can eliminate coal generated electricity in the next 30 years. Some countries states etc. may find ways to get rid of coal fired plants without converting to nuclear. I'm al for it if they can figure out a way to do it. But the bottom line is there is no reason why coal fired plants cannot be eliminated globally in the next 30 years.

If the world were to try to approach the per capita energy usage of the US, then it would be using about 8 times the total energy it now uses. Adding the effect of population growth, it would be using about 12 times the current total energy in 30 years. There is an estimated proven reserve of uranium ore at or near the concentration which is currently being mined, to provide the needed amount of fissile material for about 80 year at the current rate of consumption! If we tried to merely provide enough nuclear fueled power to not increase the use of coal, then, assuming the plants could be built fast enough, we would run out of fuel in just a couple of years. Assuming some realistic rate of plant construction, we would probably still run out of fuel in less than 20 years, after which the nuclear plants would all be shut down. Now, that is a depressing thought, but one we need to contend with. Now, we can bet on the eventual success of breeder reactors to bail us out, but that has been about a 50 year experiment so far and it apparently hasn't been terribly successful yet. Given all of that, I have to conclude that cost is an issue of relatively minor importance. The probability of lasting success has to be the issue to focus on. Renewable energy and energy storage, as pointed out in the post you replied to, has a known and tested path. It is just plain a more promising path to follow.

The cost of uranium is a minor part of the cost of making nuclear power. It is very economical to mine lower grade ores (which are extremely plentiful relative to the high grade ores you discuss) to obtain the uranium for the nuclear plants. Secondly thorium is another fuel cycle that can be used for nuclear plants and it is more plentiful in the earths crust than uranium (India is exploring using this cycle because they have so much of the material). A good link that discusses the uranium reserves is shown below

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A good link for thorium is below

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Like I said I really don't care what people do as long as they stop burning fossil fuels to generate electricity. I will say that many european countries have already resigned themselves to adding nuclear capacity to meet the Kyoto protocol because they do not have the wind power and solar power resources to meet their electrical needs and/or they feel the cost is prohibitive.

That's as shortsighted as Easter Islanders cutting down their last tree. Replacing one highly pollutive energy source with a second one that pollutes more toxically but in a different mode isn't a win

Right now we are getting the worst of both worlds. The melting of the polar ice caps which is an indirect result of our coal fired plants and the waste issue of nuclear power. I'd much prefer to have only the latter because increasing the magnitude of the waste problem two to four fold leaves far less of footprint on the environment than continuing to burn coal.

I'd like to see alternatives such as wind and solar be the only form of energy we use however as many European countries have demonstrated it is not a cost effective solution for providing more than 10 to 20% of our electricity.

It's unfortunate but the environmentalists are poised to do what they have always done in the past to reduce environmental problems (with some success I might add) . Keep people from doing anything. Unfortunately the status quo is going to lead to a disaster.

"If we tried to merely provide enough nuclear fueled power to not increase the use of coal, then, assuming the plants could be built fast enough, we would run out of fuel in just a couple of years."

I remember a forum where that point was brought up, and someone in the audience (a miner) said that uranium was too cheap to bother mining. A side effect of that (I assume) is it's also too cheap to bother looking for it. Being too cheap isn't a characteristic of something that's rare and going to run out.

Being too cheap to bother mining is a characteristic of something that is of such low quality as to be essentially useless.

to go to it as a primary source of energy. That is just a panicky reaction to the global warming problem; but it's not a savory thought to end up with five times the nuclear waste than what we already have and can't handle.

Tesla developed technology that tapped the earth's magnetic force field and produced free electricity; he proved it worked at public demonstrations; why is the brain child of the greatest genius in the field, and the father of alternating current, being ignored?

Another thing to ask yourself is how much radioactive waste is generated in the mining of that material?

Using it is one thing, how much is created just getting it into a usable form?

No such thing as a free lunch. You can't magically get energy from the earth's magnetic field any more than you can from a regular magnet, unless you wear one of those magnet bracelets. Then you can fly.

Tesla was a brilliant man, and arguably Edison stole ideas from him and did much to try and destroy him (pretty succesfully). But most of what Tesla invented we have a pretty good understanding of.

The infamous 'screw a lightbulb into the ground' demonstration is something that we can do succesfully today. All it is doing is using the earth as a low-pass capacitor and passing along a low frequency signal that then is reconstituted inside a properly isolated and tuned light bulb. the DoD does similar stuff today using the powergrid in places like Nebraska (where the powerlines stretch straight for miles) as a signalling antennae to communicate with nuclear submarines via ELF radio

But it turns out that is

1. not the most efficient way to transmit energy, since there is a fair amount of 'leakage'
2. It makes it hard to "charge" for the delivery of electricity essentially precluding a market feedback mechanism on the cost of the power
3. It dramatically reduces in power (radius cubed) the further from the source you are, whereas wireline does not.

So its not a very good way to deal with power generation

It actually is possible to get power from the Earth's Magnetosphere, just not the way the previous poster envisioned it. You have to actually be IN ORBIT around the earth. Then you tow a conductor orthoganally to the earth's magnetosphere, and since you have a conductor moving through a magnetic field, you necessarily induce a current flow in the conductor.

This was tested in 1996 on STS 75 (space shuttle Columbia) and generated some 3,500 Volts of power (about thrice what was expected).

The gotcha of course is that you are inherently slowing your orbit somewhat by doing so, which means you have to expend thrust to stay in a constant orbit. But for satellites requiring limited flight time, this is a very viable power source

"Hydro used to be thought of as environmentally sound because it generated huge amounts of power for relatively small drops in water ( Hydro power is given as

net head [(feet) × flow (gpm)] ÷ 10 = W

So if we raise a gallon of water 500' every minute, we get roughly 50 Watts/Minute or 3kWatts/hr"

Umm... no. We don't get roughly 50 Watts/Minute. We get roughly 50 Watts. Not 50 Watts/Minute. Just 50 Watts. Or 0.05 kWatts. That's what the W on the right hand side of the equation stands for. Watts.

"The average household uses 0.8kWh/day"

Umm... no. Not an average household in Seattle. 0.8 kWh/day is equal to a mean power consumption of 33 Watts. Check your own electric bill to see if your mean power consumption is 33 Watts. If I had to guess off the top of my head, I'd put the average household consumption in Seattle at 0.8 kW. That is equal to 19.2 kWh/day.

Now redo your calculation. The 2 acres of surface area you calculated is probably too low.