[TheForge] Hellooooooo!

[Todd Rich]

On Sat, 6 May 2006, Demon Buddha wrote:

>
>
> Todd Rich wrote:
>
>> We need to build about 200 nuclear power plants across the country to 
>> provide enough excess night time power to be able to produce that much 
>> hydrogen.  Plus an infrastructure needs to be built to deliver the hydrogen 
>> to the automobile fleet in this country.  It will take about 20 years to 
>> build that much, assuming unchallenged current regulations.  A government 
>> mandated plan could probably be done in about 10 years. 
>
> 	Paid by whom?

Probably by the same means paid for now.  Power companies paying to build 
the plant.  Municipalities floating bonds to pay for the plants to be 
built.  Etc...

>That's what I thought.

Gee, that is what you thought?  I would have though you were thinking I 
was going to say the Federal government should pay for it from the way you 
phrased the question.  Actually, I wouldn't mind if the Feds passed a law 
that prohibited legal challenges as long as they followed safety 
guidelines to the letter.

>
>> Legally challenged, it could be 50 or more years.
>
> 	It would be challenged, and rightly so.  Nuclear is not a good long 
> term solution, methinks.  The wastes are just too nasty.

Actually given the thousands of tons of uranium and thorium that are 
dumped into the air currently, there would be less environmental exposure 
to radioactives if we switched over to nuclear power.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

As far a nuclear wastes are concerned, the nuclear wasted produced to 
provide all the energy needs of a family of 4 for 20 years will fit in a 
shoebox.  If reprocessing of nuclear fuel were allowed in this country 
(hasn't been since Carter banned it) that amount of power would produce 
only enough nuclear waste to fit into a pill bottle.

High level nuclear waste only has to be kept around for about 1000 years. 
Yes that is a long time, but it can be done safely.

If you are worried that it will be too long, we can make thorium 
reverberatory nuclear furnaces.  Basic concept is a particle accelerator 
pointed a a pile of thorium.  When it is on, it produced more energy than 
needed to keep powering the acclerator.  When you want to shut it down, 
you turn off the acclerator.  The waste it produces, while hotter than the 
convention fuel cycle is much shorter lived, plus you can use the high 
level waste produced from a conventional fuel cycle as fuel, burning it 
up.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf35.htm

It has the added benefit of not producing isotopes that are easily turned 
into weapons grade nuclear material.

Switching from coal to nuclear would also have added benefits of 
dramatically reducing the amound of CO2 dumped into our atmosphere.