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Keynes was wrong | 57 comments (57 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: Keynes was wrong (4.00 / 2)
.. The only use for which oil is really direly necessary for civilization is lubricants, and biological sources will cover that.

I see this vision of the future a lot, and it is not possible. Because given this alternative lots of things which we would not currently do becomes very palatable.

Such as cheap-skating reactor construction.  There is no natural law keeping anyone from ripping out the furnace of a coal plant, sticking in a fission heat source and turning it back on.

Nor is it required by physical reality that one has to hold a decade of hearings before running a railline. And so on and so forth.

by Thomas on Sun Jun 1st, 2014 at 09:20:04 AM EST
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Re: Keynes was wrong (none / 1)
Thirty years ago I suggested to my physicist brother-in-law that the long term solution to reactor by-products was to launch them onto a trajectory that would take them into the sun. "That should do it." was his response. The problem then was how to get them safely off the Earth's surface and onto that trajectory. I think it is within our technical capability today to design and build a rail gun that could fire a vitrified projectile onto such a trajectory. Such a system could also serve to cheaply send materials either into low earth orbit, geostationary orbit or to one of the L5 points and could make development of a facility on the Moon sustainable and support asteroid capture and mining. Once acceptable reliability has been demonstrated we would have eliminated a major obstacle to next generation nuclear power plants. The project could be justified on the basis of the waste disposal alone.
 

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Jun 1st, 2014 at 02:44:07 PM EST
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Re: Keynes was wrong (none / 0)
Needless to say, such a system should be powered by renewables, probably wind and solar plus rather significant energy storage devices.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Jun 1st, 2014 at 02:46:28 PM EST
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Re: Keynes was wrong (4.00 / 2)
The reason everyone went for geological disposal is that it is reversible - All suggestions that end up in a situation where we cant get the stuff back if we decide to are irresponsible because we might well have uses for it once it is cooled of.

Nuclear waste straight out of a reactor is nasty stuff. Nuclear waste 500 years later.. is barely "hot" at all and contain a bunch of quite rare metals. in addition to the obvious: platinum, palladium, and technetium.

Tc is an beta-emmiter, but it has a very long halflife, doesn't exist in nature and makes nifty alloys.

This is why I tend to find concerns about really long term viability of storage a bit absurd. If we are still around at all, someone will be digging it back up.
And in an "no fossil fuels" context, noone will care.

Dry cask storage will do. Uhm. It'll probably do for the full five hundred years. There are older concrete structures than that standing, and casks are manufactured to a very high standard.

by Thomas on Sun Jun 1st, 2014 at 05:38:08 PM EST
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Re: Keynes was wrong (none / 1)
Nothing wrong with processing out as much useful elements as possible prior to disposal. But it would be a good idea to require that all long term storage be at +150 meters elevation or greater. I agree that it is possible to do nuclear acceptably well. I just seems that it is not probable, given our level of social competence. We can't even handle money without causing social catastrophe.


"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Jun 1st, 2014 at 07:11:59 PM EST
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Re: Keynes was wrong (4.00 / 2)
Dry cask storage will do. Uhm. It'll probably do for the full five hundred years. There are older concrete structures than that standing...

Modern concrete does not favorably compare to Roman concrete, which comprises a lot of the long standing concrete structures extant. Roman concrete used high alumina content volcanic ash as a major component. But not all volcanic ash is created equal. Again, I suspect that we could create concrete storage facilities that would last >500 years, but I am far from convinced that we will - due to lack of social competence.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue Jun 3rd, 2014 at 08:51:46 AM EST
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Keynes was wrong | 57 comments (57 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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