Wow, and people call me arrogant. At least I know enough to know not to argue with a nuclear engineer from Annapolis about nuclear energy, nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.
So, since this hasn't gotten any more discussion since yesterday, I have a question for you maxiep. Why is it that you think I don't know enough to argue with a nuclear engineer from Annapolis? I can understand you not knowing enough to do so yourself, and I applaud you for that self-awareness, but it isn't clear to me why you are projecting your ignorance on this particular subject onto me. Knowing your limitations, in this case, means knowing that you don't know what I know. And you don't. To think you do is, yes, arrogant. barfo
Well, then. Clear us up on your background. Fill in a bit of biography. Perhaps you are in the sciences, because you certainly don't understand economics.
By the way, that was a nice little case of hurtbutt you displayed in the last paragraph. When commenting on how the Navy uses nuclear energy, I'll take the side of a nuclear engineer who actually spent time on a boat. Vaya con Dios.
My butt isn't hurt, but I'm kind of surprised at your reverence for authority. You spent enough time in school to know that getting a degree doesn't make you right all the time. As for the subject of the discussion, two minutes of googling (or any basic textbook on the subject) will show you that I'm right. I don't expect you to do that research of course, but it is there should you ever decide to learn something. barfo
My background doesn't matter. What BrianFromWA and I were discussing were issues of fact. Facts don't change depending on where I (or he) went to school. barfo
Yep, that's what I figured. You have nothing to back up your assertion that you know as much as he does. I'm a skeptic. Unless you start providing some facts, I have no choice but to assume you're ignorant. I'll choose the guy who actually has both theoretical and practical experience on the matter.
First, I didn't say I know as much as he does. I said I know enough to discuss the issue with him. If he has the training you say he has (I missed it when he mentioned his background) then he should know more than me. And if what I've said is wrong, he can certainly jump in and correct me. As for me providing facts, I've already provided the facts that matter to this debate - facts about nuclear fission and byproducts of that. barfo
Super duper. What cracked me up was that you were either off base with your facts or using them improperly. Brian is nicer than I am and tried to help you out. Instead, you just waded further into the briar patch.
Sorry, that's not the way it went down. For whatever reason, he said some things that are just plain not true. Your believing otherwise doesn't mean much, since you admittedly don't know the subject matter. barfo
Okey dokey. I think you need to borrow Ed O's old Jack Black signature--"I know everything!" Hilarious stuff. Keep it coming.
if I understood this conversation correctly, the us navy uses nuclear reactors that don't create any nuclear waste? I guess the energy crisis is solved, then.
Ugh. Please allow me to recant some of my more generalized statements. First, I have no problem with anyone debating me on the facts and issues. If there was any offense intended, barfo, I didn't pick up on it. But as Dr. Evil misquoted me on: I didn't go to 6 years of naval and nuclear power training and 4 years of reactor operation and supervision to not be called a DoE-qualified Naval Nuclear Engineer, thank you. Sorry when I generalized that 3% was insignificant. I didn't know that I would be in a place where I could discuss intelligently the Dolly Parton curve of fission products. There are a bunch of decay products as well as fission products that are produced in naval nuclear reactors (the only ones I know from personal experience). Those that have half-lives longer than a couple of years (and therefore applicable to any storage discussion) and are a radiotoxicity danger are the actinides (though in high burnup reactors (not Navy ones) Pu238 and Cs242 are the more radiotoxic, though present in very small quantities which rise with burnup rate). First, fission products do not alpha decay...only the uranium in a spent core would give off alphas. Then again, so does your smoke detector. Alphas are dangerous if inhaled or ingested, but not 'through the skin' dangerous. Same with betas. You could hold a beta-emitter in your hand and nothing bad would happen to you (assuming its temperature were low enough). Many FP's are beta emitters. Gammas and neutrons are the "bad" ones, and they can mess you up whether the uranium's in a reactor or in the ground in your backyard. But they are easily shielded. The longest-term projection from unprocessed spent fuel in the ground is that it would take 17000 years or so to "get back down" to the same levels that are in the ground right now, mostly due to the actinides (that actually can be reprocessed out, but we won't go there yet). Sounds like it's really, really bad. But if all this stuff is so horrible, how come nuclear operators aren't being melted as they work? Shielding. I'm off on a tangent now. Basically, I come back to this. Reprocessed fuel, even if it is just the plutonium removed so bad guys don't get it, can literally be just dumped in a hole, and 50 years later are about 1/10000 as radioactive as originally it was. Let's say that, instead of a hole, you dumped it in a lake 24 feet deep. At the laketop it's 99.9999% shielded (iow, you get one one-millionth of the radiation). So in 50 years, at the bottom of a lake (or a foot of lead shielding) it's 1/10000000000 as radioactive as when it was pulled from the core. Do I want playgrounds built on top of used fuel? No. Do I think the waste issue is one of the least-important factors of increased nuclear operation? Yes. Finland and Sweden are already doing this, to some extent. As far as Naval Nuclear Power not creating waste, diablo? You're pretty close. With a bit of reprocessing (again, more to keep plutonium from bad guys than anything else, though Pu239 and 242 are bad critters) and shielding, it's not different than the stuff that's already in the ground. We've been using reactors in the Navy for 50 years...we've been reprocessing and sticking the "waste" in Idaho Falls. The "hot" reactor compartments? They're in open-air storage at Hanford. (http://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/future/trimming/index.html) I'm not trying to imply anything with this, but there's a lot of poor publicity and ignorance/fear about nuclear (not nookyooler) power generation and it's positives. An intelligent and strategic plan and trained operators can ensure power for a long time with relatively small long-term environmental impact. This, I fear, is much more political even than the climate change stuff, b/c we've all seen bad things happen with nuclear stuff (Chernobyl, Hiroshima, K-19, etc.), even if it's not understood why those happened.
Cool. Thanks, Brian, for the non-dumbed-down version. I'll think about the points you made. One immediate response, though - sounds like you are proposing removing the Pt, in order to thwart the bad guys; my understanding is that we currently don't remove the Pt, in order to thwart the bad guys. Not clear to me which is the better strategy. barfo
Brilliant post. My take is similar. People here in the USA are simply scared of nuclear power for no good reason. It's a cultural thing, if not political as well. In France, they put reactors in peoples' back yards (basically) and the people welcome them and the benefits they afford (like jobs, cheap power). And if I'm right, it was Jimmy Carter who pushed for and got the law passed against reprocessing spent fuel, even though reprocessing has great benefits: 1) You get more power from the same fuel supply, 2) the waste is easier to handle, 3) less waste to be dealt with (e.g. you'd have to "burn" more uranium/original fuel to get the same energy as with reprocessing). As I've written a few times now, I lived 90 miles from Yucca Mountain and had zero fear of waste being stored there. It's encased in a kind of glass (lead, shielded) that's so durable you can drop it from an airplane, crash a train into it, set it on fire, whatever, and it survives intact (no leakage). I've found several youtube videos showing just that, if I need to dig 'em up. Yucca is so dry, you don't have to worry about eons of time passing and somehow water damaging the containers. It's not an eyesore, as all you see is a big cave entrance because the waste would be stored underground. Correct me wrong if I have the wrong impressions about any of this.
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/n...t_on_global_warming/srvc=home&position=recent Former astronaut speaks out on global warming <!--//Byline box//--> By Associated Press | Sunday, February 15, 2009 <!--//Byline box end//--> <!--//article Image//--> <!--//article Image//--> <!--//article//--> SANTA FE, N.M. - Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming. "I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York. Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels. "They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said. Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration. Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making." Williams said Heartland is skeptical about the crisis that people are proclaiming in global warming. "Not that the planet hasn’t warmed. We know it has or we’d all still be in the Ice Age," he said. "But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there’s disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming." Schmitt said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400 A.D., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise. Schmitt also said geological evidence indicates changes in sea level have been going on for thousands of years. He said smaller changes are related to changes in the elevation of land masses — for example, the Great Lakes are rising because the earth’s crust is rebounding from being depressed by glaciers. Schmitt, who grew up in Silver City and now lives in Albuquerque, has a science degree from the California Institute of Technology. He also studied geology at the University of Oslo in Norway and took a doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1964. In 1972, he was one of the last men to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 17 mission. Schmitt said he’s heartened that the upcoming conference is made up of scientists who haven’t been manipulated by politics. Of the global warming debate, he said: "It’s one of the few times you’ve seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it’s coloring their objectivity."
