Dr Jello Doctor of Science asked:
Coal and other fuels produce tonnes of co2 every year. Half of all co2 created in the US is from power generation from coal power plants.
Coal and other fuels produce tonnes of co2 every year. Half of all co2 created in the US is from power generation from coal power plants.
By replacing these coal plants with nuclear, green house gases could be reduced a whopping 50% because nuclear power creates no green house gases and very little waste.
Would you be in favor of building more nuclear power plants to replace coal plants, or are you scared of modern technology?
June 30th, 2009 at 8:08 am
For Sure. France is almost 100% working on Nuke power sites, and I think it is great. Would love to see this country operating the same way. There are so many safegurads in place it is almost impossible to have an accident. Almost anyway.
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
No, I am scared of sexual disases.
July 5th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Going completely nuke would not be such a good idea as no technology has been developed for nuclear waste disposal and the ways that have been used don’t guarantee 100% safety. I would suggest finding other ways of going green. A combination of all green technology would be much better than just opting for one.
July 5th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
I am all for making more nuke plants. I don’t know about converting coal plants. They need some viable alternatives first. I would say keep the coal plants, add nuclear and other alternative plants and then you can start to dismantle the coal plants.
Note: We have added tremedously to nuclear technology. The technology is not 50 year old any more than our current computer or space technology is 50 years old.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:22 am
I don’t believe it’s possible for one to convert a coal plant to a nuclear plant.
And since when is a 50 year-old technology considered ‘modern’?
Alright jim. But then what person in their right mind would actually become *more* afraid of it with the advances in safety and performance? By any measure, modern tech would be less scary than the original.
If anything the people who protest against nuclear power are living in the past, focusing on a few specific events, and are completely oblivious to how safe it has actually become. They’re not afraid of modern technology, they’re afraid of old technology and too stubborn to recognize that something like chernobyl cannot really happen anymore. Maybe that’s what jello meant.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:36 am
Nuclear Power plants properly maintained can be very effective.
July 12th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Building nukes is a no brainier. Have you ever heard of a problem on a nuke sub?
July 13th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
There is a big difference between converting one plant and replacing old plants with new ones. I am in favor of nuclear power generation (even in Iran). I also tolerate coal plants as one of many alternatives.
I am not scared of modern technology. Quite the contrarary, it’s old nuclear technology that melted down. With today’s technology we can make nuclear powerplants safer than ever and we can make coal plants cleaner than ever.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:49 am
I don’t think we should force companies to shut down coal and build nuclear.
What we should do is put a pollution limit on power stations. Say each company is limited to an average of 100g of CO2 per kWh of electricity they produce by 2020.
They can then meet this in any way they want to and if they go under their limit they can sell permits to other companies.
If carbon capture is cheaper, then they will do that. If nuclear is cheaper they will build that. The market will help work out a stable power grid in a more efficient way than just swapping coal to nuclear.
Also, nuclear does create greenhouse gases. Power stations are built from concrete and steel, fuel must be mined, processed and transported etc. Some research estimates that these emissions are quite high but most credible sources place it at under 20g CO2/kWh, so it’s negligible compared to coal 700-1200g/kWh)
July 19th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Same paradigm, still owned by a large corporation or government entity therefore susceptible to greed, waste, selfishness, stupidity, human error and corruption!
Do you read the news these days?
What’s wrong with small scale decentralized renewable systems that once paid off by home owners and businesses require no more revenue to flow out of a bank account? And if done right actually creates revenue flow into your bank account by running the meter backwards?
Oh, I know… we have to keep Wall Street in the loop! Sustainable more often than not means self sufficiency and most people are scared to death about having to do things for themselves… you could call it corporate dependency, pathetic!
Nukes are just more corporate controlled money makers for the few at the expense of everyone else for the next 100,000 year half life.
Wind, passive and active solar, geothermal ard micro-hydro are MODERN TECHNOLOGIES! Just at a much smaller and safer scale.
July 19th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
I would rather see them make the Nuclear plants first. The coal can remain as a back up. Besides the sulfur and strip mining problems, there really are no major problems with coal. Nuclear plants have a habit of closing down before they are up and running.
July 20th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Nuclear is great, I think there’s room for both though. (we could make our main power source nuclear, and handle spikes in demand with coal, for example)
I think the future is in the shed-sized nuclear power plants.
July 23rd, 2009 at 2:31 pm
It would be much cheaper to just replace the current burner assemblies with modern reactors like the Japanese are now selling. They are now selling apartment house sized reactors at about half the cost of supplying the same building from a coal plant. Maybe in a couple of years we will be able to buy personal sized ones to provide the power level your house needs and the excess you do not use goes to the grid.
July 24th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
REPLACING some existing and planned coal plants with nuke plants would be acceptable to me as one way of decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels, but the return on investment is an issue as it always is with changing technologies. For example, if we could replace ALL the coal burning power plants with nuclear plants, should we do it?
I don’t think so-by the time we got the job done new techologies would be better developed, and the initial investment to replace all the coal plants would not only starve new and better alternative energy sources, it would take so long to amortize the total cost would too likely choke us in other ways.
It’s kind of like our reaction to AGW-are there a lot of people that advocate changes in our socioeconomic structure in the belief that we can mitigate climate change by doing so? Yes-but what is the return on investment-ther ROI? Some of the changes that are advocated have multiple environmental, economic and geopolitical benefits and should therefore be developed regardless of the outcome of climate research, AGW or no. Other changes are-or may turn out to be-too costly in terms of benefit long term. What if, for example, the only way to mitigate AGW was for all of us to stop wearing clothes and go around ***** 12 months out of the year? There would be lots and lots of people getting sick and dying in the cold months, and we don’t even know for sure how much it would help AGW-let alone any other benefits, which would be minor at best. So that idea-along with others that are not too far of in terms of extremist, single-purpose policies, should be discarded. But alternative energy sources? We’re spending trillions of dollars and killing thousands of people every year-including our own-to pay for the privilege of transferring our wealth to people who **** us and in some cases use the proceeds that WE pay them to kill US. And it is choking the very lifeblood out of our economy. So why would we do anything BUT do everything we can do to develop alternative energy sources and get away from fossil fuels? Yet people argue against that very thing all day long, every day because they have idealogical differences with other people who support it. When it comes to coal, you have strip mining and environmental hazards not limited to AGW.
So yes-despite the fact that I got way off track there for a minute by focusing on oil, I support any lesser evil when it comes to energy that provides an alternative to using fossil fuels, particularly oil or other imported energy. But it has to be a balancing act too, with multiple benefits and not getting too far out of whack as far as the amount that is invested in any single source. There are a lot of people out there with vested interests who will do and say just about whatever it takes to get a bigger slice of the pie, and we need to be wary of them regardless of the energy source, as well as their paid lapdogs in Washington, D.C.
As far as CONVERTING coal plants to nuclear power, I really don’t see that conversion is practical; converting coal burners to use biomass as somebody else suggested seems a relatively simple and straightforward task and then ‘all’ we have to do is deal with the differing characteristics of biomass vs. coal. That is being researched-but I can’t see where using biomass itself, e.g. the cost efficiency, would be much different than the costs of mining, processing and transporting coal. And you have a renewable source that would certainly be more carbon neutral.