Re: [Phys-l] The West Wing

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

At 09:34  -0400 5/25/06, jbellina wrote:
> Many years ago a friend got interested in what drove people to be, at 
> the time, strongly pro-solar and anti-nuclear.  It turned out to have 
> little to do with technology as such and more to do with power and 
> the size of the technology.  Solar was small, local and comfy, and
> nuclear was large dark and powerful.  So how do you address that issue?
That doesn't seem like too bad a characterization to me. It isn't 
just that solar is warm and fuzzy, it that it is local. Distributed 
power production has some advantages in efficiency--very little 
transmission line loss, and the possibility of using the waste heat 
from the power generation to provide space heating. Nuclear is big, 
needs to be (but isn't always) remote, requiring long transmission 
lines, and, compared to solar, much less safe, and then there is the 
problem of the radioactive waste products that never seem to go away.

Uranium mining isn't the most pleasant occupation, either, since it 
has all the usual difficulties involved in mining plus radioactivity. 
I presume, however, that the manufacture of solar panels isn't 
entirely benign, so on balance, that may be pretty much a wash.

Processing uranium to be used in a reactor, however, gets more and 
more expensive, in both dollars and energy as the quality of the ore 
declines with time. At some point, I suspect that the energy budget 
for processing the fuel will be such that all of the output of the 
plant will be used to process the fuel to run the plant. I think 
nuclear will become less than practical long before we reach that 
point, however.

The characterization was made during the "small is beautiful" era, 
which, alas, seems to have passed. I still think it has great merit 
as a slogan, for the idea of distributed power generation.

Hugh
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Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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