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Author Topic: Nuclear power: For or against?  (Read 3061 times)

jrients

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Nuclear power: For or against?
« Reply #15 on: November 09, 2006, 12:07:06 PM »
For.
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Balbinus

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« Reply #16 on: November 09, 2006, 04:02:14 PM »
For, for the reasons Dominus so eloquently sets out.

In addition, the environmental impact of fossil fuels is much greater in the immediate term, which we have to survive before we start worrying about the next ten thousand years.  And that's ignoring any issues about fossil fuels becoming an increasingly depleted resource.

Wind and solar are cool and all, but most companies I work with that are investing in that sector are doing it for portfolio reasons or to meet government targets, they are not producing the power that we need and are unlikely to do so on current models.  In addition, wind farms are attracting increasing public resistance.

I don't dismiss the issues Pundit rightly raises, but the other reasons cited by many posters in this thread are currently very persuasive.

Increasingly now I work in the energy sector investing in stuff like plants, but I'm too tired now to go into this in more detail.  More later.

Good threads by the way Dominus.

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Nuclear power: For or against?
« Reply #17 on: November 09, 2006, 04:23:49 PM »
Quote from: TonyLB
I thought solar and wind were still bolloxed by the peak-demand issue?  I mean, I suppose you could go with genuinely massive batteries, but this is the first I've heard about someone proposing that kind of setup in a serious way.  Color me intrigued.


Electrolyzers and fuel cells are a pretty efficient means of power storage -- instead of using batteries, you use the energy to produce a fuel which you can reclaim the energy out of at your leisure.  True, at this point, fuel cells are non mass producable and require expensive platinum plates, but these problems would be solvable with a fraction of the money that gets spent on nuclear.

Also, while this isn't a primary thing, direct solar is really effective as a supplement in places that get hot in the summer.  California is propogating a net-metering system by which anyone can generate electricity and get paid for it at a standard rate -- the idea being to make putting solar panels on your roof a simple, rewarding investment -- which is going to be a massive boon to the air-conditioning of SoCal.

I think that, given the costs, economically viable nuclear power is a complete pipe dream.  I think it is useful in places where it is difficult to store your power (long range spacecraft, submarines).

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TonyLB

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« Reply #18 on: November 09, 2006, 04:58:03 PM »
Quote from: Ben Lehman
I think that, given the costs, economically viable nuclear power is a complete pipe dream.
That's given the current costs, right?  I don't think there's any inherent dollar value to a kilowatt, so whether costs are economically viable is in balance with the prices of other sources of energy.

I think that once you get too much further than that you start to get into realms where macro-economics and foreign policy turn into a mish-mash of interconnected perception.  Does increasing a country's ability to switch away from oil to nuclear power lead to reducing oil prices?  Seems possible to me.

But, really, I don't have the background for this kind of debate.  I know just enough to know that I really don't know all that much.  Basically, I have two very limited points:
  • "Tokamak" rolls trippingly off the tongue.  Just try it!  Plus, fusion is a nice dream.
  • Some countries appear to make nuclear work well in their society.  What are they doing right?
And beyond that ... well, really, I'm interested to hear things from folks who know much more than I do.
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« Reply #19 on: November 09, 2006, 05:34:38 PM »
Quote from: RPGPundit
Nuclear power has two problems: one that is more serious than the other.  The less serious one, but the one that gets a lot of attention, is what to do with the toxic byproducts of nuclear energy.   The current solution, putting them deep in underground vaults for ten thousand years along with attempted warning signs so future civilizations won't accidentally open said vaults, is probably not the wisest course.  Something like launching this waste into the sun would probably be wiser, but much more costly.

And that's where we get into the other problem with Nuclear energy: its not actually cost efficient.  The costs of what it takes to get nuclear energy quickly gobbles up most of the return we get in the form of power. Add to that the fact that nuclear power is very expensive to maintain, and the question that we really should be finding another, more costly, solution to the nuclear waste issue than "lets put it in a hole and hope future humans won't wipe themselves out when they open it up in ten millenia", and you end up having something that isn't financially very viable, especially if you're thinking of nuclear power as the "answer" to the oil issue.

RPGPundit


First off, you've fallen for the typical anti-nuke propaganda about "Ten thousand years!!!" which is bullshit. The simple fact is that by concentrating radioactive material to make it more potent andn thus serve as reactor fuel, you cause it to decay faster. Information I've been given indicates that the vast majority of processed racioactive material will decay to safe levels in at most 600 years. Sure, it's still a long time, but not 10,000 years.

Disposal is not an expensive problem if done right, one of the best ways, ironically, to dispose of nuclear waste is to put in in old oil wells. The underground pockets that held oil deposits held them for MILLIONS of years, they would lieklly hold the vitrified waste for a few centuries.

Likewise old gold/silver mines in deserts could hold also hold waste safely isolated from groundwater for the necessary time, it's not a problem.

Also factor in then environmental costs of burning even 'clean' coal and the greenhouse emission it produces, compared to the fact a nuke plant produced ZERO greenhouse gas.

Lastly, the french, for god's sake, use nuclear power on a massive scale and do do safely and effectively. If they can do it then surely other countries can as well.
RPGPundit is a fucking fascist asshole and a hypocritial megadouche.

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« Reply #20 on: November 09, 2006, 05:57:27 PM »
Much of the cost assosiated with building and running a nuclear power plant, in the US certainly, is dealing with the rabid 'anti-nuke' crowd. Seriously, the plants themselves aren't superhumanly complex monstrosities only buildable with 'precursor' technology or some shit.  Building a mile long bridge is more challenging from an engineering standpoint, and they've been doing that shit since the black and white era before they invented colors.


Take my local area. Some power company started building a nuclear plant. On came the lawsuits, the protests of 'not in my back yard' and so on and so forth. After about ten years of dealing with the protesters and class action suits they went out of business. Irony? The plant was fully built and ready to go, but never once used.
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« Reply #21 on: November 09, 2006, 06:13:36 PM »
Quote from: TonyLB
That's given the current costs, right?  I don't think there's any inherent dollar value to a kilowatt, so whether costs are economically viable is in balance with the prices of other sources of energy.


There is a baseline cost, in my book, although it is quite high -- the cost of producing with wind power.

Now, wind power is bloody expensive compared to coal and even to oil and gas.  In the modern economic world, it's largely a feel good option, or made possible by government subsidies / restrictions.

My thought is this: No matter how efficient nuclear power gets, the whole cost (including waste storage and transfer) is never going to be cheaper than wind.  Solar, maybe (though there's a way to go), but not nuclear.

(Once you start having an reasonable fuel-cell infrastructure, which we're going to need regardless of whether we're using solar, wind, or nuclear, the timing issues of solar and wind are totally moot.)

Hence: cost-efficient nuclear power is a pipe dream.

Secondarily, I think we need to move our energy production out of its hunter-gatherer phase (digging for coal, uranium, petroleum) and into a farming phase (using solar energy in the form of solar, wind, or hydro power.)

If we develop fusion reactors, I'll be totally psyched, but I'm not holding my breath.  Myself, I'm all for diversifying energy production away from powerplants, and into backyards and rooftops.

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« Reply #22 on: November 09, 2006, 06:27:09 PM »
Quote from: Balbinus
In addition, the environmental impact of fossil fuels is much greater in the immediate term, which we have to survive before we start worrying about the next ten thousand years.  And that's ignoring any issues about fossil fuels becoming an increasingly depleted resource.
There are two important things you're forgetting here.

The first is that to create nuclear power requires the depletion of fossil fuels. Diesel-fuelled digging machinery digs, diesel-powered trucks cart the ore away, coal-fired plants mill the ore, gas-fired stations provide the electricity for the gas centrifuges doing the enrichment, etc. It may be objected that in future we could have hydrogen-fuel-celled machinery, and nuclear power stations for the enrichment, etc; but currently we don't have these things. It's prudent to base your plans on what has been proven to be technically possible, not on what may or may not happen. No-one is proposing that we set up vast hydrogen-generation plants powered by nuclear reactors, etc. They're only proposing more nuclear reactors.

So, generating nuclear power burns fossil fuels. Generating energy also consumes energy, and this energy has to come from somewhere.

The second point is that uranium, like coal, gas and oil, is a finite resource. We often see grand numbers tossed around of the amount of uranium available, giving amounts available in the sea, too. But while there are large amounts available, the useful amounts are considerably smaller.

Again, getting this uranium consumes energy. Now, uranium is an ore like any other. Sometimes you'll find a seam of the ore where 5% of it is uranium; sometimes only 0.0001%. So from one mine, for every 100 tonnes of ore you process, you'll get 5 tonnes of uranium, but from another mine, only a couple of kilogrammes of uranium. To process 100 tonnes of ore takes the same amount of energy whether you get 5 tonnes or 2 kg of actual uranium out of it. Of course the enrichment takes less energy, but the mining and milling takes the same energy.

So, if you have this 5% ore, getting 5 tonnes of uranium out of that 100 tonnes of ore, that's great, you'll get lots more energy from the uranium than you consumed mining it. But when you come to that 0.002% ore, with 2kg out of 100 tonnes, then the energy balance doesn't look so good.

What that means is that only ores of a certain grade are useful for energy. This has nothing to do with money - it's a physical process to dig the stuff up and mill it. It's energy. So what you can do is to calculate how much energy the stuff can generate, and then calculate how much energy it takes to mine it and mill it, and then you'll find the ore grade below which it's not useful to mine for energy.

When you go through and do all the calculations, it turns out that below ore grades of 0.02% - less than 20kg of available uranium per 100 tonnes of ore - you spend more energy processing it than you'll get out of it in a nuclear reactor.

So, only uranium ores of above 0.02% grade are useful for energy. This cuts out a lot of the uranium which actually exists in the world. When you divide the total energy this uranium can get by the current electricity production of the world - that is, suppose that all the electricity gets generated by nuclear - you get about seven years' supply.

Some people answer that "fast breeder" reactors will solve this problem. Now, in uranium, there are two main isotopes - U-238, and U-235. U-235 is the one we want for nuclear power, because it's radioactive, breaks down; but it only makes up 0.7% of the natural ore. A "fast breeder" reactor is designed to turn some of the U-238 into Pu-239 (plutonium) and U-235, so that in principle instead of using 0.7% of the uranium, we'd use 100% of it; instead of 7 years, then we'd have 1,000 years. However, in practice the best performance attained by any fast breeder reactor has been to create another 0.2% of U-235 and Pu-239, and the best performance hoped for in theoretical designs is to create 0.5%. That would mean that you'd put (say) 2kg of U-235 in, and when that was consumed, you'd then have 1.6kg of U-235 and Pu-239 left.

So the best we can hope for from fast breeder reactors is that they'll increase the effective supply by 80%; so we get 12 years of world electricity supply instead of 7 years.

You can fiddle with the figures a bit and get much more pessimistic or optimistic results, but you can't reasonably hope for more than 20 years' electricity supply, with any foreseeable technology.

That's the energy balance. Let's imagine a perfect nuclear world.
  • nuclear power and waste disposal becomes perfectly safe.
  • we develop a method for decommissioning power plants and rendering the area they were on usable - not one single power plant in the world has ever been completely decommissioned, usually they just put up a fence - but let's imagine we actually do it.
  • the other problem of fast breeder reactors is that they produce weapons-grade plutonium. Imagine every country in the world with weapons-grade plutonium. Iran, Libya, Botswana, Chile - all of those countries with the means to make nuclear weapons.
  • for the world to produce nuclear energy entirely, we'd be talking about one new nuclear power station being built somewhere every month for the next forty years.
  • so that means nuclear energy not only for Australia and Canada and the like, but for Ghana and Zimbabwe and El Salvador. Will they be as safe as us?
Let's imagine that Perfect Nuclear World, that all these problems are magically solved.

That still leaves less than twenty years' energy supply from nuclear power - at best.

Then what? Then the uranium runs out, and... we're back to where we are now, wondering about renewable energy.

Wouldn't it be simpler to not bother, and just go straight to the renewable energy? Think of it this way - you learn that you're going to be fired from your job. You're not sure when you'll be jobless, and lose your money supply. Could be a month from now, could be a year. But you know your time is limited, it's finite. And they're also going to halve your wages at some point along the way. When do you start looking for a new job? Now? Or do you wait until you're actually fired?

So, we know that the fossil fuels, and the uranium, are going to run out. Maybe fifty years, maybe twenty, who knows. Before they completely run out, at some point world demand will exceed world supply. What happens when demand of a vital resource exceeds supply? War, social chaos, famine. So when should we start looking at resources which do not run out, ever?

We can continue using resources which will run out - coal, oil, gas, uranium - or we can use resources which are infinite - wind, solar, tidal, geothermal. Use finite resources, or infinite? Wow, difficult question!

So I oppose nuclear power for the simple reason that it's stupid to use a finite resource when we have an infinite one at our disposal.

Certainly there are technical difficulties involved in establishing renewable energy networks. Likewise, there are technical difficulties with nuclear power. The technical difficulties with renewable energy do not involve relying on every tin-pot little country in the world being able to deal with radioactive materials safely, and relying on them never to be tempted to develop nuclear weapons.

Seems like an easy question to me.

Quote from: Dominus Nox
Also factor in then environmental costs of burning even 'clean' coal and the greenhouse emission it produces, compared to the fact a nuke plant produced ZERO greenhouse gas.
The plant itself produces none, but as I explained, the mining, milling, refining, etc, produces greenhouse gases. It's rather like the fact that the tomatoes I get from the supermarket actually absorbed greenhouse gases while growing, but to fertilise, pesticide, harvest and transport them hundred of kilometres to the market produced several times more greenhouse gases than they consumed while growing.  

Quote from: Dominus Nox
Lastly, the french, for god's sake, use nuclear power on a massive scale and do do safely and effectively. If they can do it then surely other countries can as well.
The French also have nuclear weapons. Do you fancy Botswana, Libya, Ghana, and Chile with nuclear weapons? Do you think those countries can build, operate and maintain nuclear reactors as efficiently and safely as the French? Perhaps you're too young to remember the nervousness of the world when the Soviet Union had a coup d'etat, and later Pakistan. We got lucky, and the nukes were safe. Are we willing to trust to luck again? The current world pressure on Iran seems to suggest we're not willing to trust to luck, and the good judgment of those countries...

Use a finite resource, or an infinite resource. You're a citizen in a democracy, so it's up to you.
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« Reply #23 on: November 09, 2006, 06:34:08 PM »
Quote from: Ben Lehman
Now, wind power is bloody expensive compared to coal and even to oil and gas.  In the modern economic world, it's largely a feel good option, or made possible by government subsidies / restrictions.

It should be noted that fossil fuel use is also only made possible by public subsidies. If the entire cost of drilling for oil, refining it, and building metalled roads, traffic lights, etc, had to be borne by private companies... it just wouldn't happen. Power stations of all kinds are paid for by government - public - money. No private company ever came up with a couple of billion dollars on its own to build a power station. The public ponies up the cash, whether it's coal, oil, gas, solar, nuclear, whatever.

Power stations, whatever their source of energy, are quite simply public works projects, like roads, dams, canals, railways. Private companies may build the things, and fund them in little corners here and there, but the stuff on the national scale is funded from the public purse.
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« Reply #24 on: November 09, 2006, 06:54:00 PM »
Quote from: JimBobOz
It should be noted that fossil fuel use is also only made possible by public subsidies. If the entire cost of drilling for oil, refining it, and building metalled roads, traffic lights, etc, had to be borne by private companies... it just wouldn't happen. Power stations of all kinds are paid for by government - public - money. No private company ever came up with a couple of billion dollars on its own to build a power station. The public ponies up the cash, whether it's coal, oil, gas, solar, nuclear, whatever.

This is %100 true.  That said, wind farms are, right now, an order of magnitude more expensive than coal plants.

I mean, I'm with you.  I would rather my government invest money in wind, solar, and hydro than coal.  Coal is cheaper, but I just spend three years in China with its Dickensian levels of air pollution, and I'd rather have functioning lungs and less money, thanks a bunch.

Nuclear has all the advantages:  more expensive, non-renewable, and polluting (although largely less and in a more controlled manner than coal).

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« Reply #25 on: November 09, 2006, 07:23:55 PM »
Quote from: Ben Lehman
This is %100 true.  That said, wind farms are, right now, an order of magnitude more expensive than coal plants.

"An order of magnitude" means "ten times." Wind turbines cost about twice what coal turbines cost to build. "Twice" is not "ten times." However, once built, the wind is free; you have to keep feeding coal, oil, gas, or uranium into the other reactors. The $ cost of a power station is,

+$ cost to build (ratios, nuclear 4: solar/wind 2: coal/gas 1)
+$ cost to maintain (ratios, roughly the same for all)
+$ cost to fuel (ratios, nuclear 10: solar/wind 0: coal/gas 1)
+$ cost to decomission (unknown, no nuke station has ever been fully decomissioned, nor have wind and solar stations)

Coal-generated electricity here in Australia has been the cheapest in the world because they build the coal-fired station next to a coal mine, and supply the energy company with the coal for nothing, the company just has to dig it up, and they even get a public subsidy for that. It'd be like my running a trucking company and getting the diesel for free, or running a restaurant and getting the food for free. You can bet I'd be boasting about the cheap prices I could supply our services at. Coal-fired stations which have to pay the market price for it are rather more expensive to run... and end up, over their lifetime, more expensive than wind, solar, etc.

But in the end, the dollar cost doesn't matter. Over the lifetime of a power station - 24 years for a nuke station, a bit more for fossil-fuelled stations, about 50 for wind, 20 for current solar - inflation, deflation, wage costs, interest rates, all that shit can change, so who the fuck knows.

What's important is the energy cost, and whether you're getting your energy from a finite or infinite source. At some point, the coal, gas, oil, and uranium will run out. So it doesn't matter what the price is, then - there's none left. Whereas the sun is always up there, shining, heating air and making wind, helping things grow, which things we can turn to ethanol and burn....

Some mixture of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and ethanol-fired steam turbines, in combination with lower consumption, is what'll work well. Lowering consumption is very effective. Most countries, for example, just the homes changing to fluro bulbs from incandenscents will lower national power consumption by about 5% (more in developing countries without heavy industry using lots of power, less in developed countries). That 5% is usually a couple power plants' worth. Shutting off appliances with "standby" modes will in the developed West save another 5%.

In the developed West, we're very focused on using labour efficiently. The farm which produces 1,000 people's food with 1 man's labour is considered better than the same farm using 50 people's labour. We ought to have a similar focus on using resources efficiently. At the moment we don't bother because money's the most important thing to us, and labour is expensive but resources are cheap. A few government regulations could change this easily. For example, the Olympic Dam uranium mine in South Australia gets for free access to the water table, and uses as much water as all the homes in Adelaide; the farmers next to the mine have to pay for their water. Uranium mining and power generation wouldn't look quite so cost-effective if the Olympic Dam blokes had to actually pay for the water they used. Same goes for the coal-fired electricity generation at Hazelwood here in Victoria.

If they have to actually pay for the resources they use, then they'll use the resources efficiently. Then that'll put a fresh perspective on fossil and nuclear power vs renewable.
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« Reply #26 on: November 09, 2006, 07:27:25 PM »
Quote from: JimBobOz
It should be noted that fossil fuel use is also only made possible by public subsidies. If the entire cost of drilling for oil, refining it, and building metalled roads, traffic lights, etc, had to be borne by private companies... it just wouldn't happen. Power stations of all kinds are paid for by government - public - money. No private company ever came up with a couple of billion dollars on its own to build a power station. The public ponies up the cash, whether it's coal, oil, gas, solar, nuclear, whatever.

Power stations, whatever their source of energy, are quite simply public works projects, like roads, dams, canals, railways. Private companies may build the things, and fund them in little corners here and there, but the stuff on the national scale is funded from the public purse.

Although Ben may believe what you've written here is 100% true, I'm not so sure.  Could you provide some links or other information source supporting your assertion that fossil fuel use is only made possible by public subsidies?

I mean "No private company ever came up with a couple of billion dollars on its own to build a power station," is quite an assertion.

EDIT: I see your response to Ben, are you talking about Australia, the US, the world?
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« Reply #27 on: November 09, 2006, 07:40:26 PM »
Quote from: James J Skach
Although Ben may believe what you've written here is 100% true, I'm not so sure.  Could you provide some links or other information source supporting your assertion that fossil fuel use is only made possible by public subsidies?

To say "only made possible" was wrong. Fossil fuel use would happen without public subsidy. It's bettter to say, "fossil fuel use is only as cheap and widespread as it is, due to public subsidy."

You can research this easily for yourself. Get out your street map of your city, and locate the major roads, and power stations. Then go and look up who paid for them. It's the public. Then consider your favourite petrol station, and find out where he gets his petrol from. Then look up that major oil company, and see how much taxes they pay, and what subsidies they receive from the government - from the public.

Add all that up, and it's billions of dollars. Now imagine that there was no public money for it, the private companies had to come up with the billions by themselves. Not likely to happen.

Quote from: James J Skach
I mean "No private company ever came up with a couple of billion dollars on its own to build a power station," is quite an assertion.

Yep, it is. But I can't prove a negative, you can only disprove it. Just look up all the commercial power stations you can think of, then look up how they were funded. There are too many power stations and roads and so on in the world for me to link you to references to them all. Look up your local ones for yourself. Follow the money.

Quote from: James J Skach
EDIT: I see your response to Ben, are you talking about Australia, the US, the world?

I talk mostly about Australia because I know it best, and because we're such a dreadful example of wasteful fossil fuel use, and also a country whose government is considering nuclear power generation. We're also an example of a developed nation, and most countries in the world want to be developed nations - so when we talk about the world using nuclear energy, that doesn't mean just the happy friendly Western democracies, it means poor countries suffering civil conflict, and plenty who hate us, too.

I mention that because one of the central boasts of nuclear power is that it's greenhouse-neutral. As I've pointed out, that's not true. But let's suppose it is - it doesn't do the world climate any good if the developed West stops generating its half of the world's greenhouse gases and the developing world doubles its own output. We close down 1,000 fossil fuel stations and open 1,000 nuke stations - fine. But then China and India and Zimbabwe and Iran and Chile open 1,000 fossil fuel stations. Woops. Haven't improved things much, have we? So if we propose nuclear power as a solution to global warming, that means nuclear power for everyone.
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« Reply #28 on: November 09, 2006, 09:19:21 PM »
Quote
Something like launching this waste into the sun would probably be wiser, but much more costly.


Do you really want to risk having a Challenger explosion spray bits of toxic waste instead of school teacher? :eek:

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« Reply #29 on: November 09, 2006, 10:10:33 PM »
Quote from: JimBobOz
To say "only made possible" was wrong. Fossil fuel use would happen without public subsidy. It's bettter to say, "fossil fuel use is only as cheap and widespread as it is, due to public subsidy."

While I appreciate your candor, I'm not sure it's right to make the assertion you have. In particular, the widespread use of fossil fuels was on it's march long before the government ever started with tax incentives. And cheap?  I wish I could use you to convince people here who do nothing but complain about how expensive it is. Until I have more evidence, however, I'll let this one pass to you.

Quote from: JimBobOz
You can research this easily for yourself. Get out your street map of your city, and locate the major roads, and power stations. Then go and look up who paid for them. It's the public. Then consider your favourite petrol station, and find out where he gets his petrol from. Then look up that major oil company, and see how much taxes they pay, and what subsidies they receive from the government - from the public.

I hope you're not implying that roads are subsidies for power companies, are you?  I mean, my word, the absurdity of that, from you, takes me a bit by surprise. Perhaps in Australia it’s different. Do you have public roads that were created solely for the power companies? That would piss me off, too.  We tend not to do that here. Are there joint ventures here? Yeah, that happens. But they tend to be neutral – that is, for a mall to be put it, they have to pay for a portion of the improvement required to keep traffic moving (new turn lanes, traffic light, etc.).

But we can agree on one thing - subsidies are crap, whether for agricultural or oil.

Quote from: JimBobOz
Add all that up, and it's billions of dollars. Now imagine that there was no public money for it, the private companies had to come up with the billions by themselves. Not likely to happen.

I'm not so sure I'd make that claim. Instead, I think the problem lies in allowing those same power companies to charge what they want.  See, here in Illinois, in the states, we're going through this interesting problem. If you want the details, I'll go into them.  However, suffice it to say that there was an exchange of monopoly for rate control.  That's changing, but there's still a hew and cry for the government to control the rates, you know, to avoid us being raped by the eeevil power company. If you stop that crazy cycle, I'd bet the companies would rush in to fill the demand.

Quote from: JimBobOz
I mention that because one of the central boasts of nuclear power is that it's greenhouse-neutral. As I've pointed out, that's not true. But let's suppose it is - it doesn't do the world climate any good if the developed West stops generating its half of the world's greenhouse gases and the developing world doubles its own output. We close down 1,000 fossil fuel stations and open 1,000 nuke stations - fine. But then China and India and Zimbabwe and Iran and Chile open 1,000 fossil fuel stations. Woops. Haven't improved things much, have we? So if we propose nuclear power as a solution to global warming, that means nuclear power for everyone.

I know the argument made against yours. That it is better to still be at 2000 fossil fuel stations than at 3000.  I don't agree with it, but that's the argument I always see. However, I disagree with the idea that just because we have nuclear power, Zimbabwe and Iran get to as well. To try and create some sort of moral equivalence is abhorrent to me.
The rules are my slave, not my master. - Old Geezer

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