nuclear

djpbarry wrote: »

Have you? Been using any portable electronics lately?

Advances in portable electronics are primarily due to improvements in micro-circuitry.

15 years ago I had a portable cassette player. Needed audio tape and it had a lot of mechanical parts IIRC.

Nowadays, you can fit many times the music of a cassette tape onto an SD card the size of your thumbnail.

You have no reason to believe that there will be any advancement in renewable energy technology ever again? I’m beginning to find it very, very difficult to take you seriously:

Let's just say I'm skeptical, especially with wind.

I don’t think you’ll find too many people sharing that belief, so please stop constructing nonsense arguments and attributing them to others.

Great - just as certain sectors stop making ridiculous comparisons between nuclear and renewables as if it were THE either/or choice.

Renewables will do what they will, they'll either get better or they won't, or more likely just continue sucking up subsidies, killing wildlife and producing an unreliable energy supply.

But since a 100% renewable scenario is more or less of the table, the choice still has to be made between fossil fuels (e.g. coal) and nuclear.

That is the choice that has to be made and we've seen it Germany, where they've gone mad on a coal fired power spree and simultaneously made the country an economic vassal of Russia via Gazprom.

And now we're seeing it in Japan where there will be power shortages, an increase in electricity costs to pay for imported fossil, the economic subjugation of that country to Russia, a first in 30 years trade deficit, oh and the big one, all the environmental damage that will be done burning all those filthy fossil fuels, like oil and coal.

Two words: uranium mining.

I don't know enough about it to comment, but I'm sure that, like everything else, there's a right way and wrong wat to do it.

We don’t.

Glad we cleared that up.

Hang on there now just one cotton-picking minute – you’re telling us that we can’t stockpile fossil fuels...

...but we can fuel cars with them? Care to fill in the gaping hole in that argument?

1. For one thing, we're already doing it with oil.
2. I'm just saying its an option, they're looking at it in the United States (The Pickens plan).
3. If we accepted as a given that Ireland will always import X amount of natural gas, would it make more sense to burn it in power stations, or divert it to cars, displacing oil?

Ireland’s size is completely irrelevant. How much is this stockpile of uranium going to cost? How long will it last? What happens when Ireland needs more but, because a bunch of other nations have also gone nuclear, the price has gotten so high Ireland can’t afford another stockpile?

You were given an estimate of 200+ years supply at current consumption. And that's just uranium.
May I also remind you that 2 energy companies thought there was uranium in Donegal?

Oh that’s right, I forgot, thorium and breeder reactors will sort everything.

Yes, I believe the Indians are going to get it - whereas historically there was only marginal interest in the West (cold war and all that), India has a massive population and an emerging economy, they will make it a high priority. Their need for energy will not simply be a theoretical issue.

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

we aren't going to win a bidding / influence war with China.

No, but the same is as true of oil and gas as with uranium.

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

figure out how much steam you could store in a billion euro worth of underground resevoir

I'm sorry, but after reading this I just couldn't take the rest of your post seriously.

djpbarry wrote: »

Fueling cars with it implies stock-piling – you said we can’t do that with fossil fuels. Are you suggesting now that we can?

I'm reasonably certain that I never claimed it was possible to stockpile fuel for cars. If I did, it was unintentional.

Great – that doesn’t answer my question. How much will it cost for Ireland to build up a uranium stockpile to meet its energy needs, how much will that stockpile cost and how long will it last?

I never said that stockpiling would be a necessity, just a good idea. But in answer to your question.

The World Nuclear Association estimates the cost of obtaining 1kg of nuclear fuel at about US$2700. Of which US$1300 comes from the price of U308 and the rest from processing costs, leading to, in their estimate, a fuel cost of US$0.0077, thats .77 of one cent, per kilowatt-hour, assuming that the fuel yielded 360,000 kw/h.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

Ireland used just under 27 billion kw/h of electricity last year,
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=ei&v=81

so our fuel requirements would be 75,000 kg per year, (360,000 * 75,000 = 27,000,000,000) or 75 tonnes if you prefer. Total cost for the year would be $202,500,000 (or 75,000 X US$2700), which is entirely reasonable IMO for a national annual electricity fuel cost.

That's assuming every single kw/h was generated by nuclear power plants which is not what I would be after, I'd be happy with say 50%. The rest to be generated by renewables (which I'm not totally against, just skeptical of) and some fossil fuel backup generators, used in emergency or on an as-needed basis.
So we're down to $101,250,000. Or €78,372,562.50, for a years nuclear fuel @ 50% of national demand.
http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert/?Amount=101250000&From=USD&To=EUR
Assume that we have spent fuel reprocessed on our behalf and that number goes down again, but I don't know by how much.

And since Donegal may have Uranium there's a good chance a lot of that money would stay in Ireland.

After that, calculating the cost of a strategic uranium reserve depends on how long you want to stockpile for, and what assumptions you make about future energy demand.

Oh, you believe the Indians will crack it, do you? Based on?

My reasoning is this: Cracking the Thorium nut was never a serious issue for the West. With a people scared of anything nuclear and plenty of fuel from other sources, we never really needed it. That and while the West really was a strong bloc, up until 1990, "we" were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the larger countries in our group (US, UK, France) needed traditional nuclear infrastructure to develop nuclear weapons. Unfortunately the same was true of the Soviet Union itself hence their use of RBMK reactors :mad:

For India and China it's another story. Between them they have well over 2 billion people and their governments intend to give them all a Western lifestyle. They also have massive reserves of the stuff, should they ever find use for it.

In summary:
If cracking the Thorium nut is simply a matter of doing enough research, they will do so because it is a national imperitave and that guarantees they'll put in the necessary effort to do it.

[MOD]Posters have entertained plenty of nonsense from your good self – you are in absolutely no position to play any “I can’t take you seriously” cards.[/MOD]

Ok, if you say so (and I'll admit I may have gone off on a tangent here and there ), but I mean come on, underground steam caverns?

djpbarry wrote: »

Is that right? So AAA batteries are still powering everything, are they?

In a way I wish they were - it seems every device has its own unique propietary standard battery these days :mad:

So, just to clarify, you have been arguing on here for several years now that nuclear is way, way cleaner than everything else...

...and in all that time you never bothered to read up on the damage that uranium mining does? Are you kidding me?

One of the reasons why I have never looked specifically at the issue of Uranium mining, is because part of that would be carbon dioxide emissions (these are alledegy going to cause climate chaos and should be paramount on everyone's mind)

and everything I've read suggests that the indirect lifecycle CO2 costs of nuclear energy are comaprable with wind and hydroelectricity. Those lifecycle emissions include those of mining and processing fuel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_of_life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Greenhouse_Gas_Emissions_from_Electricity_Production_IEA.PNG

As for any other issues, as I said I suspect it's a case of there being a right way and a wrong way to do it, just like with a wide variety of other industries.

So yes, I stand over my claim that nuclear way cleaner than coal and oil, likely also solar PV which has severe manufacturing costs, less so gas, the CO2 stats for one clearly back me up on that.

So how long will it take to build your stockpile then?

A hypothetical stockpile is only necessary if you think everything's going to go down the toilet, e.g. that international relations are going to get worse, fuel is going to be scarce etc.

It would be a very good idea if we could do this for gas considering that in future we'll have to feed and placate an increasingly wealthy and aggressive Russian 'Bear' to keep the lights on, the way we're going. Germany is already there, thanks to its anti-nuclear movement.

But yes, you could build Ireland's stockpile over 3 years, taking 1% of annual production each year. And you could probably fit it all into a large warehouse. Likely side effects would be short term increased mining/exploration and and very small price increases consistent with supply and demand.

I wonder what would be involved in building a 30-50 year stockpile of gas? I'm guessing it would be more difficult.