Planet Money Presidential Platform (Page 2)

I have zero problems with conservation. As gluttonous as we are, we have plenty of room for improvement in that area.

In our energy portfolios, there is plenty of room for more wind and solar... plenty. Renewables only account for 12% of our energy production and 10 of that is hydro. But wind and solar is not a replacement for base load generation. 20% would be a good number... and that is 10 TIMES current installed capacity.

 Every utility has demand side conservation programs, but those are slow. A 10% reduction in consumption over ten years is a very aggressive target. That is great, but it is not a silver bullet.

Nuke is dead until we withdraw from the non proliferation treaty and start processing our spent fuel. Period. Pick your poison. It is simply ludicrous to continue piling up nuclear waste around the country in sites never intended for short term storage let alone long term... which they are now by default.

Bush funded Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. GNEP. All ideas were on the table including processing spent fuel. I thought it might turn out something good, but it seems dead. There was one minor little problem.... we were going to make small modular reactors and give them to anyone, on the condition that when it was time to refuel they would send it back and we would give them a new one... kind of like propane for your grill. We would then process the spent fuel and get the U235 and P239 for reuse and dispose of the waste..... oh ya, that minor problem... the U.S. was going to become the depository for the worlds nuclear waste. Good luck with that... we can't even put it in Nevada.

It's not a replacement for hybrid battery technology but nuke is far more cost effective and environmentally friendly than coal and oil burning plants.  I kind of did use a bit of a mixed message in my post.  Sorry.

My point is that with new reactor technology you can build lost of smaller plants to supply power to regional areas and cut out some of the distribution losses.

It is not "far more cost effective" Nuke is still slightly more than coal when you factor in spent fuel. It is still a thermal plants, and fuel and regulatory costs make it more than coal. In the beginning, nuclear energy was going to be "so cheap we won't be able to meter it". Well they found a way.

Environmentally friendly is relative.... global warming, heavy metals.... deadly radioactive substances fro 1000s of years.... hummmm. Ask those dealing with it a couple of thousands of years from now.

There has been a lot of talk about micro nukes, but it hasn't got anywhere. The talk mainly revolves around a distributed system instead of the centralized system we have now. Using fuel cells, micro nukes, micro turbines to generate energy locally instead of distributing it. But that involves a total remake of our system, with other hurdles and reliability and back up problems to work out. You gain transmission losses, but you loose economy of scale savings.... and then there is the minor little problem of 1000s of small nuclear reactors sitting around in neighborhoods. Sort of a tough sell.

You can't make fuel. We used breeders to "produce" plutonium for weapons. Helps to be the first. Your breeder still requires us to withdraw from the NPT, or rewrite it. Breeders are not "hugely" more efficient. It is still a thermal plant with the same thermal plant limitations as all the others.

Processing waste is certainly a good idea. Much much less waste to deal with, close the fuel cycle. Recoupe unused fuel and seed with U238 which is what is found naturally in 99.5% of uranium. Great idea. Let's do it! But cesium 137, is still cesium 137 and it is still made in breeders and it still has a half life of 10,000 years. When you split atoms, you do not get to decide what they split to.

Time for bed... nighty night.

Here's that program.

Thorium reactors: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/thorium-reactors-could-wean-world-oil-just-five-years

This is the type of stuff we need to be supporting...

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf98.html

Sorry... Cesium 135... 2.3 million yeasrs. Here are the long lived isotpes.

So this is going to be long.... The original promise of nuclear energy was that by closing the fuel cycle, we could use U235 which is less that 1% of natural Uranium, to produce P239 and make more fuel than we use. We have HUGE Uranium reserves around the world and it was considered a near limitless energy source.

The Non-proliferation treaty killed that. The conventional wisdom for the last 60 years has said that there is absolutely no way to power the world with Uranium, process the fuel and recover the fissionable products, and then provent that material from eventually making it to the black market and be used to produce a weapon. It is a violation of the NNPT to process spent fuel to recover fissionable material to power reactors. We do not process spent fuel.... we produce Plutonium to make weapons. We are allowed, because we were the first. The NNPT killed nuclear power.

What the NNPT did was to say that if you agreed to not make weapons, or enrich fuel to make weapons, then we would give you nuclear power. If Iran is enriching fuel to make weapons, they are in violation of the treaty which gives us the right to end their nuclear power program... however you want to take that.

Breeder reactors are nothing new. They use fast neutrons which are not moderated to produce P239. That P239 will in turn be fissionable in the reactor and can produce energy. That's great, but it complicates the reactor, and it is not as safe as light water reactors, or pressurized water reactors as they are classified. FNR do not need a moderator to slow down the neutron to cause fission, because Plutonium can fission with fast neutrons. PWR need water to moderate or slow down nuetrons to fission U235. That is inherently safer.

Water is used as both moderator and coolant. If you have no coolant, then you have no fission reaction. If the reactor overheats, the reaction slows down. It is self regulating. I won't go into Chernobyl... the reactor was a completely different design that is very unstable at low power levels where the explosion happened. But it was a graphite moderated reactor. Meaning it had everything needed to sustain a reaction if it had no water... which is what it did for a very long time after the expolsion.

If a FNR gets too hot, it will actually increase the reaction. There are other ways to control it, but it is more complicated. FNR fuel has to be enriched higher... over 20% which is bomb grade and presents other problems. The military is allowed to have bomb grade fuel and their reactors on boats are so enriched they do not need to be refuled for 30 years. We could do the same commercially... if the military ran out reactors, or we rewrote the NPT.

So PWR won the war. They are very simple. They are inherently safe, and if you closed the fuel cycle and process the spent fuel, you would recover the P239 and P241 and put it in the next one and have an endless fuel supply.

Last... we have to be careful with terminology. Slow neutrons are called "thermal" which is what you were refering to with "thermal reactors" being less efficient. Efficiency only depends on the boundaries you place. Thermal energy output of FNR are indeed higher for the fuel put in which is what efficiency is. How much energy out do I get for the energy put in. In this case the FNR makes more fuel than put in so yes it is higher.

However, I was refering to "thermal" power plants. A nuclear reactor, no matter what it's design is nothing more than a thermal source to power a thermal plant. Produce steam to drive a turbine to turn a generator. That entire process is very inefficient, but water is plentiful so who cares. A nuclear power plant has the same heat rate as modern coal plants.... how many BTUs it takes to produce a kw of electricity. Since fuel cost more to enrich in a FNR, there is no saving compared to coal. Coal is slightly cheaper to use to produce electricity than nuclear power.

I guess what I am saying is that none of this stuff is new. This has been discussed for decades. We know all sorts of ways to produce power... but how complicated is it, how much does it cost, and what are it's parasite costs. Enriching uranium, processing spent fuel, and dealing with spent fuel and nuclear waste make nuclear power very very expensive, even though the energy source is very very dense.

Nuclear power would most certainly be viable if we pocessed spent fuel and withdrew from the NPT. However, nobody has been willing to do that for 60 years. At least the waste we did produce would be very very concentrated instead of the hundreds of tons of fuel assemblies we have sitting around now. But they would still be very deadly for 1000s of years. And isn't that the problem.... ruining our tomorrows for power today. At least if we do stop producing CO2, it will be absorbed into the cycle much more quickly that that vault of waste we have buried somewhere that will remain deadly long after we are gone.

First off... articles like that irritate me. Electricity IS NOT a replacement for OIL! The battery technology is not there. The reason oil is so darn good, is because of it's portability and it's energy density. OIL is for TRANSPORTATION, not for "power production". There is NO viable alternative for OIL at this time. PERIOD, end of story!

The article topic is really interesting. Cool to know about Thorium and it's abundance. But as I pointed out above if you read that book, was that we have all the Uranium we need. The fact that we can produce fuel with U238, which we have a near endless supply of, means that we do not need an alternative. That's fine that thorium is abundant, but so is uranium. So it is solving a problem we do not have.

But Thorium does seem to have some advantages. It all comes down to the bean counters and what the pros and cons are and what the end cost is. If thorium replaces uranium, that's fine by me. Sounds cool.... but that does not get us off oil.... that get's us off coal. Yes we can power our transportation with electricity, but not right now... because batteries do not have the energy density, nor the portability that oil does. And yes we can shift our commuting energy to electricity, but that does nothing for planes, trains, trucks, and ships... the life blood of the world distribution system.

There is nothing that is going to wean us off oil in 5 years... we already have electricity. If you want to use thorium to power a micro thermal plant in a car... OK, but my guess it is would be really realy expensive and certainly not going to happen in 5 years. You would have to drive a micro turbine with steam, or some hot gas, which would be cool, but we can do that now with various heat sources and it is simply not economical compared to internal combustion engines. Even though I think it would be really cool to have a steam turbine powered car... I sort of like steam turbines.

No one ever said it's a replacement for oil.  But it does help reduce the amount of oil (and natural gas) we use in power generation which is not insignificant.  It also reduces the amount of coal we burn which is VERY significant.

You seem to see this as a all or nothing venture.  It's not.  Let's at least REDUCE our oil consumption.

The title of the article is "Thorium reactors could wean us off oil in 5 years".... what am I missing? The article states thorium to be used for power production, you posted the article... seems somebody is saying it is a REPLACEMENT for oil..... which it is not.

With the recession, power is actually at a glut right now. Use has gone down. We have all the excess capacity we need to charge batteries for cars today, right this second. But nobody is doing it. Thorium does not solve that.

In power generation, only 2% of our oil is used for that. Those are sort of odd cases where it makes sense to keep using it... but I do not see how, because it is expensive. It is certainly not because it is a good source of fuel. But it is a very small amount. To at least stop using oil for power... we can do that today. For our power production, oil makes up less than 1%. We do not need Thorium for that either. But obviously, we should stop using oil for power.

After that, coal accounts for 45%, and natural gas 23%. 68% of our power is fossil fuel bassed. (Nuke 20%, renewables 10%) If you want to shift power generation from coal and gas to thorium, or uranium, great, fine by me..... but it does ZERO to get us off oil, or foriegn oil. Thorium still has to compete with coal and gas, which is abundant and cheap. Uranium is around the same, and we still have waste to deal with.

Oil is a completely different discussion. I'm not saying getting off oil is a all or nothing proposal, but it most certainly is a completely different problem seperate from domestic power production. I have been trying to dig up info on what oil is used for. Depending on where you look, it is around 35-40% of our oil is for transportation. 30% of that is for cars. I was supprised that ships, trains, and air travel make up a smaller amount. So if we look at transportation, seems it is a big area for reduction. Right now, oil is still used for heating. Natural gas should do that... but that is in older places that do not have the infrastructure.

All the home owners would be forced to switch to propane and get rid of their oil tanks and furnaces. I don't see a lot of vollunteers. Maybe the government can pay for it. But it is like 12%. I have always though conservation allone, switching to natural gas for heating, and employing more mass transit could significantly lower our oil use... 20-30%? That's great. We still need oil for other uses though so it isn't like it is going to be zero. We use it for asphalt, lubrication, plastics, military, roofing. Could we get it down to 40-50%??? Maybe, but we are still going to use oil, we will just stop burning it. Which is cool. Give me an alternative and I'll use it.

We have a ton of ways to do things... they all have their pros and cons... and then it all comes down to $. Right now, even though oil has gone up in price. The entire world still considers it the best source for transportation. We are not at a point where it makes sense to use something else.

Oh.... and as far as the OT:

1. OK

2. Sounds great.  Ihave absolutely no idea why HC is tied to employment, and why I can shop health care/insurance like I do auto/home/life.

3. OK, are they going to pay Fair Tax?

4. Yes. Today.

5. No. It's ridiculous. We will shift when it is time. Any sooner all it is is another tax on me for no reason... because I will be the one paying it. It certainly won't be the companies producing it, it will be the consumers consuming it.... and I just started paying sales tax on it.

6. Yes. Today. Along with opiates, stimulants, halucinogens, and horse tranquilizers.... oh ya, bath salts too. Prohibition is an evil in and of itself.

Here's an idea. Turn off the lights at night! I get off work at 1 AM. My drive home could be done with my car lights turned off until I get into my neighborhood. Do the lights in the parking lots of a closed business really need to be on at this hour? Storefront signs and billboards are all on. We have lighted freeways. Empty buildings have 60% + of the offices lit up. Does all this stuff need to be lit up for me and the 8 other motorists out at this hour? I realize this is not a solution, but it would go a long way in reducing consumption.

I was using it as an intro to T reactors.  I agree, the title is incorrect.

The point is that there are existing technologies out there right now that we could be using to bridge the gap from fossil fuels.  To me, the dangers from climate change and continuing the road we are on is immensely more dangerous than the dangers of nuclear energy.  We simply don't have the luxury of 50 or 100 more years of doing what we're doing if we want to keep a climate that resembles anything like we're used to.

It certainly is interesting. My job isn't to burn coal, it's to produce electricity. If there is a better way, I'm cool with that. I have zero problems with fission. I have a problem with our policy on processing spent fuel and waste storage. I seen no reason to continue touting the benefits of nuclear power until that very real problem is dealt with.

Thorium has some advantages. If you do some reading, don't take it all as gospel. Much of the "advantages" are shared with uranium. Yet Thourium certainly has some over Uranium and if it is a better way to go that is cool. Coal can most certainly be relaced with uranium, we just don't have the will. Coal can be repalced by Thorium and if it is a better power source all around... then let's do it.

Looking into some stuff, China passed the US with coal use like I knew. But what is interesting is that China and the US use more coal than the rest of the world combined. It does not exactly seem fair to the rest of the world if one believes those that think coal is killing us.

What is really interesting is you can use gas turbines with thorium reactors which increase efficiency. CO2 turbines have been getting a LOT of R&D and are very promissing to increase efficiencies... even in existing thermal plants by using their waste heat to power them. Waste heat accounts for the HUGE energy loss of thermal plants and this could help that.

Power production is by no means at the end of it's road and we can get off fossile fuels with other sources. Solar and wind are not that. Solar and wind should be part of the portfolio, but they are not a viable replacement.

I'm sorry if I have taken this too far. I just really dig the topic and it is a very important one to discuss. We were blessed at the beginning of the industrial revolution to have such abundant energy sources, but those days are gone. Sex can kill you, drugs are indeed addictive, and our energy policy needs to change. We do eventually figure it out.

Thorium based nuclear power

Liquid Flouride Thorium reactors

There are a ton of feasible ways to make power.... there are very few that are ecconomical. VHS/beta, AC/DC, FNR/thermal reactors... lots of ways, one wins, one looses. Looking at thorium reactors shows a much bigger advantage over a FNR. Breeders are not a better answer over thermal, and it does nothing to solve waste and proliferation.

But it is funny you think the temperature outside is more critical, than piling up nuclear waste that can actually kill any living thing for 10 of thousands of years. I mean you actually do know the problem.... climate change. climate change isn't going to actually kill us. All climate change does ultimately do is limit the amount of life this planet can sustain.

What is the magic number? How many people should we strive for... 10 billion, 20 billion, 1 billion, 100 million??? You tell me... what is the magic number of people that should live on the planet, and what is the ideal temperature we should set the planet at?

It just suprises me that you feel climate change is a bigger danger to living things than vast amounts of nuclear waste piling up. If we got all our power from nuclear energy, then we would have 5 times more waste than we have now... China would more than double all of that... the rest of the world would more than double that. What do you plan on doing with all of it?

It's not about a magic number of people who should live on the planet or some ideal temperature.  We know humans are the most adaptable species on the planet and can probably deal with whatever is thrown at us in some form or another.  But I think about the planet I'm leaving for my children and my children's children and that's where I worry.  Is it fair for them to have a lower standard of living, have to deal with an increased # of disasters, food shortages, abandoned cities, just so I can pay $0.06 / Kw for electricity?  I'm not trying to be an 'alarmist', there's no way to say with 100% certainty exactly what the future will hold, but I think it's a matter of risk management.   It's something we do in every other facet of our lives, but when it comes to climate it seems like we just throw it out the window.  Yes there's a chance it could be rainbows and unicorns and everything could just go on as it always have.  But if you're going to acknowledge that, you also have to acknowledge that it could also be worse that we think and factor that into the risk analysis as well.  Right now we only factoring in that it could be fine, yet the evidence is piling up that the bigger impacts outcome is more likely than the less.

The fact is that we're putting more pollution into the environment than can be processed naturally.  We know this because for example the concentration of CO2 is rising (if the earth could process it all, the concentration wouldn't be rising).  We also know that the changes we're already seeing are outside the range of natural variation and looking at what has happened in the past, we see there have been enormous changes in the environment at levels we will be approaching soon (we are seeing effects now, but nothing that would be a big challenge to adapt to).  For example, paleoclimate studies show that in the past the icesheets have collapsed when CO2 concentrations hit about 450 ppb.  Right now we're on track to reach that level in about 2050 or so.  Does that mean that in 2050 the ice sheets will collapse?  No.  Does it mean the processes today are working in the exact same way they did back then?  No.  But these types of risks are something we have to take into account when we're thinking about risk management and the possible costs of continuing to do what we're doing.  we know that many (perhaps even most) natural processes don't behave in a linear fashion, that many systems including climate and ecosystems experience rapid state changes when they reach a critical threshold, and most of the time those thresholds are only evident in hindsight.  We most likely won't see a dangerous change coming until we're past it (and way past when we'd be able to do anything to prevent it).  Even at todays concentrations of Ghg's my kids are almost definitely going to experience conditions of climate and ecosystem assemblages that are outside the range humans have experienced and evolved to thrive in since they first appeared a couple of million years ago and it would be foolsih for us not to factor in the risks that those future conditions could be detrimental to our ability to thrive.

I'm sure everyone knows where I stand and is sick of me saying this is a problem, but to circle back to the original discussion, to me, it's called global change for a reason.  Nuclear waste (even if we were to expand current nuke technology with the really bad waste, and not be able to use FNR or thorium for decades) and the dangers with generating power from nukes are essentially local problems.  They are serious risks, I agree with you there, but it's not putting at risk millions of lives or increasing the likelihood of a lower standard of living, which in my view, climate change does.  Taking the bigger picture, that's why i think the risks from climate change are much bigger than the risks from nukes and obviously enormously bigger than the risk of being wrong about potential impacts.  Realistically, nukes are the only feasible technology we have available right now to get us off of carbon fuels within a timeframe where it will matter to my kids well being.  So for the one guy or gal who actually read all that I apologize and to make it up, I have a joke - knock knock...

I agree... nuke power is the only viable alternative to fossil fuels for power production. I'm OK with nuke waste if we deal with it. Right now, we have no long term storage, and it is just piling up all over the country. That is ridiculous. If we processed it... which means extracting fuel, and extracting the actual radioactive byproducts, and store them long term without the TONS of other material that isn't radioactive... I'm all for it. If other technologies can solve the waste problem better... let's do them. Talk about an actual revolution... high skilled manufacturing, highly educated job fields, a building boom that rivals the post war expansion....

This time was always going to happen... when things get crowded, resources get scarce, and systems become strained. If we do not stop using coal, then we have to use it better. More efficiency, and cleaner emissions. If we are not going to do that, then we need to have a better plan than throwing money away on solar panels and wind farms.

I understand the Sagan point of view, but he also died in 1996.  We have a much clearer understanding of the problem and it's consequences than we had 17 years ago.  Outcomes which may have seem adaptable-to back then we're now finding are on the less likely end of the spectrum and we're finding things are progressing much faster than most scientists have predicted.  In past episodes of elevated CO2 there's evidence that sea levels have risen up to 250' over a span of just 30-50 years.  Is that adaptable?  The probability of that happening in my lifetime is probably fairly small (though on our current path that risk for my children is greater and for my kids kids greater still), yet so is the probability of my house burning down, and I throw money at that every month when I pay my insurance bill.  Is that an acceptable risk or is the risk of 'throwing untold amounts of money' to develop nukes and alternative forms of energy greater?  I think you know where I stand, but the point is that it's not even a conversation we're having, it feels to me like we purposefully don't do the risk analysis in case the answer is something we don't like, it's easier just to dismiss it all by saying it's all too expensive, or that stuff could never happen without actually examining the evidence and probabilities of action and inaction.  We have a much greater understanding than Carl Sagan ever had, yet we aren't making any effort to update our risk management strategies and incorporate new info - we just assume the costs and risks are the same as they were back then.

The efficiency of solar is not there, and the land needed is a big factor. Again, it isn't that we can't make electricity from panels, it's that they are not economical. And all the government has done is pay for a industry that can't support itself. I'm not entirely opposed... I see no reason it can't account for 20% of our energy, but it will take time and better efficiency.

You may be surprised by this, but I think all old small coal plants should be shut down. I feel that utilities should be able to trade old for new with all the emissions controls. It's a start. No new coal, only replacement. There is a switch going on right now for gas turbines.But coal helps stabilize the market, and it is in fact cheap as dirt. And I work in one of those old  plants... but it has all the latest greatest. I would be perfectly happy working at a gas turbine.

Carbon capture and sequestration is a pipe dream at this point and one I don't really see the point of. Capture is relatively easy, but sequestration is the hard part. We most certainly can "clean" coal. Either on the front end or the back... but if reducing carbon emissions is the driving force, coal is going to have a hard time.

Nuclear energy has come a long way since the last reactor was built here. Lots of good ideas on the table, and they are "shovel ready" that can be done TODAY. Fukashima is just another case of ignorance. It was not built appropriately and was a very old design. And yet that old dinosaur killed a modern nuclear renaissance today. Our own aging fleet needs to be replaced, and there are much better designs to do it with.... yet here we are. We are installing scrubbers on my plant.

Yeah, it's interesting how when the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970 many of the eviro's went along with the idea of grandfathering in old coal plants to get the bill passed because it was assumed that since they were approaching the end of their design lifetime the'd be replaced with cleaner plants before long.  Yet here were are in almost 2013 and there's something like 150+ plants built in the '50's still operating...