Posted on 06/22/2005 9:56:33 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
"There is a growing consensus that more nuclear power will lead to a cleaner and safer nation," President Bush said on Wednesday during a trip to a nuclear power plant in Maryland.
"It is time for this country to start building nuclear power plants again," he said to applause at the Calvert Cliffs plant.
"We're taking practical steps to encourage construction of new plants, Bush said, as he pressed Congress to send him an energy bill by August.
President Bush joked that he didn't understand all the buttons and dials in the control room of the Calvert Cliffs plant -- but he said he does know that when the people of Maryland flip a switch and see their lights come on, they need to thank the people working at the nuclear plant.
He said nuclear power is the one energy source that is "completely domestic, plentiful in quantity, environmentally friendly, and able to generate massive amounts of electricity."
The 103 nuclear power plants currently operating in America produce about 20 percent of the nation's electricity, Bush noted, without producing a single pound of air pollution or greenhouse gases.
In terms of safety, times have changed since the 1970s, Bush said. Advances in technology have made nuclear plants far safer than they were before. Yet no new plants have been built in the U.S. since the 1970s.
In his speech, President Bush noted that Americans are using energy faster they they're producing it. "We really haven't confronted this problem," he said, noting that he's been asking Congress to send him an energy bill for the past four years. All he's gotten is debate and politics but no results, he said. "So now's the time...for Cognress to stop the debate, stop the inaction, and pass an energy bill."
The House has passed an energy bill and the Senate needs to do so, the president said -- before the Senate's August recess.
President Bush said gasoline prices will not drop when he signs a bill. But making the nation less dependent on foreign oil will make life better for future generations, he said.
They recycle the vast majority of it. There's a very small bit they can't figure out what to do with. I posted a link earlier.
... our current draconian policies about drinking and driving.
I have been uninvolved in that fight for some time, so I am not sure I understand what "draconian" policies you are referring to. Also, IIRC, each state has their own laws on this subject. No?
There is an actual group called DAMM Drinkers Against MADD Mothers who lament the cases where responsible, professional couples go to dinner or a party, have a couple, then get pulled over, blow .09 or .11 and then lose 20,000 worth of money and property and carreers as well. You can google DAMM and learn more. Often they are also treated like some kind of criminal or thug, jailed, manhandles, all kinds of atrocities over .10 or .11.
Madd's stated goal is .05 by 05. I don't think they will make it but they probably will eventually.
To avoid ambiugity, so_real deduced -- via info from this article -- that 7.4 million lighter-sized bits of unrecyclable bits of waste would be generated in this country if it were fully nuclear. Note: this would mean increasing the number of reactors five-fold.
Assuming each is a cubic inch -- which would be bigger than a lighter -- that's 7.4 million cubic inches or 4,282 cubic feet. The C-5 Galaxy cargo plane can carry 35,000 cubic feet of cargo. In other words, if this country were completely nuke it would take over eight years to produce enough dangerous, unrecyclable waste to fill a single cargo plane.
And that assumes to we don't find a use for this powerful stuff, which seems an unfair assumption.
I am sorry, but I will have to take issue with this statement:
...where responsible, professional couples go to dinner or a party, have a couple, then get pulled over, blow .09 or .11 and then lose 20,000 worth of money and property and carreers as well.
If these "responsible professionals" hit and killed my child blowing .11, $20,000., property and careers would not be nearly enough to lose IMHO.
Aggrevated vehicular homicide is the only socialy acceptable form of MURDER. At least it use to be. Now there are many others.
Well until that happens, and it will be quite some time...I'll take MODERN nuclear power, one once of doped silicon in an efficient solar panel costs more than an ounce of GOLD...the rest are junk...
Three Mile Island? Chernobyl?
TWO examples of OLD nuclear technology, Chernobyl is a JOKE, the entire place was a dump before the meltdown, typical of many Soviet installations. Location is key, there is plenty of desert in the USA where you could setup modern nuclear power stations...
Solar is great for powering a calculator.
End overpopulation from immigration, Age says.
Then we'd have more energy to go around and less polution too.
The satellite would convert the solar energy to microwave and beam it directly on line to receivers at certain main power plants, who would convert it to electricity and send it to regular power plants.
To transmit solar energy to space craft they propose using radio frequency or laser beams.
I couldn't find the reference to the beam to Earth being microwave, but I remember that was what was proposed back in the late 1980's when I was a sustaining member of the organization and helped fund their research.
Microwave energy beam from space solar satellite could heat water here on Earth and steam driven turbines could generation electricity to send to regular power stations, is what I recall.
Dr. Gerald O'Neill's untimely death in 1992 took a lot of the steam out of his drive to make these satellites a reality. He had invented a GPS system and was on the Ariane launch schedule to get a GPS satellite privately owned by SSI up in the early 90's to be a money maker to help fund the solar satellite project.
I don't know what happened to that all upon his death as I was deep into starting my own practice at that time and lost track of his work, and didn't hear of his death till years later.
Right
Furthermore, I recently heard the current estimate of stored radioactive waste in the United States amounted to the size of a football field, 10 feet deep.
We don't recycle our fuel. The amount of waste will drop -- along with the cost of nuclear power -- when Jimmy Carter's directive is rescinded.
Geostar was the GPS satellite Gerard O'Neill invented. Here is the obituary that was written about him in Physics Today by Freeman Dyson.
The Life of Gerard K. O'Neill
Gerard O'Neill had three careers. As an experimental physicist, he invented and developed the technology of storage rings that is now the basis of all highenergy particle accelerators. As a teacher and writer, he explored the possibilities of human settlement and industrial development on the Moon and in orbiting space colonies. As an entrepreneur, he founded several companies to develop new commercial technologies, ranging from a cheap satellite navigation system (Geostar) and a secure short-range office communication system (Lawn) to a high-speed train system.
O'Neill began his scientific education as a radar technician in the US Navy. He then went to Swarthmore College as an undergraduate and to Cornell University as a graduate student in physics. After earning his PhD in 1954, he came to the Princeton University physics department as an instructor. Two years later he published a letter in Physical Review entitled "Storage-Ring Synchrotron: Device for High-Energy Physics Research." In two pages it laid down the path that high-energy physics has followed for the subsequent 36 years. If you read the letter now, you can see that almost everything in it is right. But it took a long time before most of us understood how right it was. O'Neill built a storage ring himself at Stanford to convince people that it was feasible. He solved the tough technical problems of injecting a beam from an accelerator into the ring and keeping the betatron oscillations of the particles in the ring small, so that a substantial fraction of the injected particles were stably captured.
By 1965, using the Stanford linear accelerator as the injector, he had storage rings running with large enough circulating currents to do the first colliding-beam physics experiment. The experiment, done in collaboration with Burton Richter and others, was a measurement of electron-electron scattering at a center-of-mass energy of 600 MeV, far higher than any fixed target experiment could achieve. The results showed that electrons behave like structureless point charges down to distances of the order of 10^-14 centimeters. After this demonstration that storage rings actually worked, high-energy physicists all over the world hastened to build their own.
With the benefit of hindsight we can find one serious mistake in O'Neill's 1956 letter. He grossly underestimated the possible improvement of high-vacuum techniques: He claimed that a storage ring could hold a beam with a lifetime of a few seconds. If he had said hours instead of seconds, nobody would have believed him. It took 20 years before storage rings with lifetimes measured in hours became routine. By that time, having taught the world how to do high-energy physics, O'Neill had moved on to other things. His 1968 proposal to use an electron-positron storage ring accelerator as a K-particle factory, with the energy tuned to sit exactly on the narrow phi resonance at 1020 MeV, has begun only recently to receive serious attention.
In 1965 O'Neill became a full professor at Princeton, where he remained until his retirement in 1985. He enjoyed teaching and devoted much of his time and energy to doing the job well. In 1969 he was responsible for teaching Physics 103-104 the basic introductory physics courses. He decided to reform the courses radically, replacing the traditional problem exercises with "learning guides," which led the students step by-step to a deeper understanding of what they were doing. The reform was an immediate success, and the learning guide system is still used in Princeton courses today. When O'Neill was concocting problems to put into his first learning guides, the students had recently been watching the Apollo missions on television, and so he emphasized applications of elementary physics to people and things in orbit and on the Moon. These orbital problems were popular with the students. At the end of the term, O'Neill asked the class to write a term paper about a human habitat in space, calculating the requirements of mass and energy and propulsion for a viable settlement. The students responded enthusiastically to this too.
After reading the term papers, O'Neill was infected with their enthusiasm and wrote a paper of his own, "The Colonization of Space," which was published in 1974 in Physics Today. Thereafter, space colonies remained one of his main interests. In 1978 he and his wife, Tasha, founded the Space Studies Institute, a privately funded organization that supports technical research on the science and engineering of space activities. The institute successfully built a working model of a mass driver, a device invented by O'Neill for cheap and efficient movement of materials from the Moon or an asteroid into orbit.
It was characteristic of O'Neill to combine far-reaching visions with practical work in the machine shop. All his inventions, whether in high-energy physics, space technology or high-speed trains, were worked out in real hardware models with meticulous attention to detail. When, as usually happened, experts in the fields that O'Neill invaded raised objections to his ideas, he had always thought of the objections first and found ways to answer them. Some of his commercial ventures failed for financial and political reasons. Not one of his inventions failed for technical reasons.
O'Neill founded the Space Studies Institute with the intention of introducing a new style into the world of space technology. His purpose was to organize small groups of people to develop the tools of space exploration independently of governments and to prove that private groups could get things done enormously cheaper and quicker than government bureaucracies. And to bring his vision of the free expansion of mankind into space to a wider public, O'Neill wrote books. His first book, The High Frontier (William Morrow, 1977) has been translated into many languages. It established O'Neill as spokesman for the people in many countries who believe that the settlement of space can bring tremendous beneflts to humanity and that this is too important a business to be left in the hands of national governments. In 1985 the US government recognized his status as an advocate of the private sector by inviting him to serve on the National Commission on Space.
O'Neill's third career, as an entrepreneur, began with the Geostar project in 1983 and was in full swing up to the day of his death. His final venture, the high-speed train system, which he called VSE (for velocity, silence, efficiency), was started during his last six months. The basic idea of VSE is to build a train network like a telephone network, with all trips non-stop, the stations widely distributed, and the switching system transparent to the users. Unlike other high-speed train systems, VSE is designed to outperform commercial airlines-in velocity by a factor of 5, in silence by a factor of 100, in efficiency by a factor of 10. Like other O'Neill inventions, it will have to wait a long time before the world discovers how sensible it is.
I was privileged to be a close friend of two great men, Richard Feynman and Gerard O'Neill. I was often struck by the deep similarity of their characters, in spite of many superficial differences. Both were indefatigable workers, taking infinite trouble to get the details right. Both were effective and enthusiastic teachers. Both were accomplished showmen, good at handling a crowd. Both had good rapport with ordinary people and abhorred pedants and snobs. Both were uncompromisingly honest. Both were outsiders in their own profession, unwilling to swim with the stream. Both stood up against the established wisdom and were proved right. Both fought a fatal illness for the last seven years of their lives. Both had spirits that grew stronger as their physical strength decayed.
Gerard O'Neill died on 27 April 1992, after losing a seven-year battle with leukemia. Like Richard Feynman in similar circumstances, he worked and pursued new adventures until a few days before his death. He accomplished more in the years after he became sick than most of us accomplish in a lifetime.
Freeman J. Dyson
Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, New Jersey
from Physics Today, February 1993
What happened to Gerard O'Neill's GeoStar project is discussed later in this article from www.permanent.com
The first and foremost private organization, and the only not-for-profit one I cover in this chapter, is the Space Studies Institute (SSI). First, SSI has been the foremost leader in the field of space resources utilization. Secondly, outside of government circles, SSI has produced the largest quantity of useful research and development for utilization of lunar and asteroial materials, their sole focus. SSI's emphasis is on the private sector, though as a 501c3 not-for-profit organization SSI cannot embark on a mission itself. The results of this research and development are available to any private companies and consortiums embarking upon a venture. SSI is a not-for-profit research organization in the truest spirit. SSI thrives off of generous philanthropic donations and various subscription services such as their "Senior Associate" program.
Besides past and present research, SSI is one of the very best organizations to know for meeting many of the best research professionals in the relevant fields.
SSI was founded in 1977 by Princeton physicist Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill. SSI's mission is to fund research and development leading to lunar and asteroidal resources utilization which NASA, other governments and the private sector are not supporting, i.e., it is independent of political winds and business trends. SSI's research is usually performed in conjunction with private companies, universities, and sometimes NASA, but SSI is not dependent upon them for its existence and SSI's policy is not shaped by any subserviant desire for contract money. SSI has maintained focus on its mission for more than 20 years now.
For example, SSI entered into a joint project with McDonnell Douglas Corporation, Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America, an industry giant) and Goldsworthy Engineering for the construction of a pilot-scale solar powered glass composite production facility. Using a 10.3 meter concentrator with a focusing capacity of 10,000 suns, this unit is the first large-scale demonstration of lunar processing techniques. This is just one of many, many examples of SSI research projects performed in conjunction with technical leaders in private industry.
The best place to find information on SSI's past and present R&D is on the SSI website at http://www.ssi.org and with particular emphasis on their research and development page at http://ssi.org/research.html which gives a long list of past and current research projects. However, I could not find information on some SSI research projects which I know are ongoing and have achieved results. This is consistent with SSI's consistent neglect of their website since the inception of the web, largely the result of volunteers who just don't get the job done completely.
There are a couple of things in particular not covered by the SSI website which I should add here:
When the US Department of Energy and NASA were completing studies into launching Solar Power Satellites (SPS), it was clear that their price tag was far too high due to the studies calling for the satellites to be launched up from Earth. Largely in response to this behemoth government contractor generated scenario, SSI sponsored a workshop on utilizing lunar materials led by Dr. O'Neill and Dr. Charles Rosen, president of the Machine Intelligence Corp. (specializing in machine intelligence and teleoperation), which came up with a proposed set of equipment to be delivered to make a small, minimal lunar base on the Moon and a small space industrial facility in high Earth orbit which would process the lunar material into fuel propellant and other basic products sellable in orbit, including for solar power satellites. The emphasis of this scenario was "bootstrapping", i.e., using the first products to expand the lunar base, space manufacturing facility and transportation infrastructure. Hence, the first deployment was to be a "seed". A report entitled "The Low Profile Road to Space Development" gives an overview of the plan.
In contrast to the government contractor SPS proposal costing hundreds of billions of dollars before payback, the Low Profile private sector report conservatively estimated that the total cost before breakeven was around $7 billion, that is, roughly the cost of the Alaska oil pipeline project. Subsequent work has reportedly improved upon this scenario whereby the cost before breakeven has been reduced, but I've not seen any later published report.
The government reports made assumptions to simplify their study, which were easy to make since it would be government work instead of profitable private sector work. For example, they assumed no bootstrapping. They also assumed all infrastructure to build SPS would be developed, built, launched and put into operation producing SPS before any revenues came in.
However, in my opinion, the weakness of the SSI "Low Profile" scenario is the reliance on a lunar transportation system that was too risky and unnecessary. It was an electromagnetic launcher on the Moon, called a "Mass Driver", invented by Dr. O'Neill, with three models of the accelerator section built and successfully tested (each model making major improvements in economics over the previous model). Reliance on such new transportation technology entails an additional risk which is hard to sell. They should have based the system on more mundane transportation technology. (Understand, I worked in the field of electromagnetic launchers for the Pentagon's SDI/"Star Wars" and have much confidence in the technology, but I'm a physicist, not an investor.) SSI and its people are heavily invested in the Mass Driver and believe in it.
Asteroidal resources were not considered in the Low Profile report. Many researchers see asteroidal resources as more economical than lunar resources. Since the time of the Low Profile report, the distribution of SSI research money has shifted significantly so that their interest now reflects both asteroidal and lunar materials in a more balanced way. Mass Driver research and development has not continued like before.
Another piece of history worth mentioning is that Dr. O'Neill privately founded a separate company called GeoStar to provide global positioning system (GPS) services, based on a technology patented by Dr. O'Neill. It was clearly Dr. O'Neill's intention to make a lot of money from Geostar and give it to SSI. Dr. O'Neill saw the promise of large revenues from the global positioning business. Dr. O'Neill and some of this top associates started spending a lot of their time, effort and resources getting Geostar up and running. Geostar used no SSI research, as it was technically unrelated, so all time, effort and resources going into Geostar did not benefit SSI one bit.
However, two tragedies struck. First, Dr. O'Neill was diagnosed with leukemia in 1985 and had to reduce his workload. Secondly, the first two satellites deployments failed, one due to a rocket failure during launch and the other after being deployed in the right orbit (the satellite just suddenly went dead). Soon after the second satellite failure, Geostar failed (even though both satellites were insured).
There are two theories on why Geostar failed. One school of thought blames it on key management decisions, which I'd rather not go into. However, Geostar's main competitor who was extremely successful in providing GPS services told me that Geostar's failure was because they tried making a better satellite rather than using off the shelf components for a sufficient first generation satellite (which is a management decision, of course). He attributed it to Geostar's academic staff. He said that his company got up and running with quick revenues from GPS services using equipment put together quickly, and that's why they beat Geostar in grabbing market share.
Of course, the not-for-profit SSI is entirely independent of the for-profit (and now defunct) Geostar Corporation. SSI would have benefitted from Geostar's success, but did not (and legally could not) invest any resources into Geostar. The two were entirely separate entities in every way except that some people who worked for Geostar also did things for SSI. It is good that SSI remained a separate, not for profit entity not affected by business or else it could have failed as well.
Dr. O'Neill died from leukemia in 1992, but SSI has taken on a life of its own, and continues to be one of the top leaders in performing research and development in utilizing lunar and asteroidal resources.
For example, the Lunar Prospector probe which verified ice at the lunar poles (verifying what Clementine 1 detected, and roughly quantifying it), was initially designed by SSI and its associates. SSI had always wanted to search for volatiles in the permanently shadowed lunar craters. NASA didn't buy into this visionary project until after the Defense Dept. Clementine probe discovered the ice. (The Clementine project was in turn led by some SSI followers.)
SSI hosts and co-sponsors (with the AIAA -- American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) a series of bi-annual conferences, the proceedings of which are published by the AIAA, the latest being held in May of 1997. A list of papers presented at these conferences is available on the PERMANENT website. This is one of the two top conferences in the space resources field, and should not be missed by any serious entity.
Notably, at one of the SSI conferences, one of the family owners of the Shimizu Corp. (discussed below), without any prior notice, walked up to Dr. O'Neill and gave him an envelope with a very large sum of cash for SSI.
If you're interested in developing a business plan to utilize lunar or asteroidal materials, it would be a good thing to get in touch with SSI, who know many technically skilled people in this field. You can contact SSI by sending e-mail to ssi@ssi.org.
You and I may disagree on which is the 'cart' and which is the 'horse' when it comes to nuclear power and nuclear waste, but I have enjoyed the debate. You've been factual and sincere throughout this thread and I've enjoyed posting with you. Thanks!
Safe nuclear power is a great option for the world's energy needs.
So many places could benefit from Nuclear Desalination Plants it would be amazing.
The Messianic Government will definitely approve of safe nuclear power for Planet Earth.
pinggggg for later
Ditto that :-)
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