Asymmetrical Information

I have this naive vision of our eventually using nuclear power to produce hydrogen from sea water. Can someone tell me why that wouldn't work better than getting it from hydrocarbons?

Katherine,

Environmentalists are the ones who want hydrogen power.

Environmentalists hate clean, safe nuclear power for reasons I can't understand.

Thus, we can end up with that system only by accident.

Katherine,

Environmentalists are the ones who want hydrogen power.

Environmentalists hate clean, safe nuclear power for reasons I can't understand.

Thus, we can end up with that system only by accident.

Katherine: there's nothing scientifically wrong with your idea, but politically it's probably a non-starter. All the enviromentalists are paradoxically opposed to nuclear power, even though it's both quite efficient and among the most environmentally friendly methods going. This has led to the somewhat bizzare situation in which France leads the world in nuclear power.

Megan: Great article, and thanks for pointing it out. A lot of people seem to think hydrogen is free for the taking and only eeevil ooooilll companies are keeping us away from the nirvana of fuel-cell cars.

Katherine,

Environmentalists are the ones who want hydrogen power.

Environmentalists hate clean, safe nuclear power for reasons I can't understand.

Thus, we can end up with that system only by accident.

Sorry, I meant scientifically why it wouldn't work. The optimist in me assumes that when our supply of fossil fuels dwindles, nuclear power will become politically acceptable for want of a better choice. And what I'm hearing is that, if that day comes, I will be able to tool around in my nuclear-powered Protege. Nifty.

Katherine:

There are no technical barriers to using nuclear power to desalinate seawater and electrolyze the fresh water to produce hydrogen. As others have pointed out, nuclear power is more of a political problem than a practical one.

However, the world has seriously limited reserves of U-235, which fission reactors require to produce electricity. I think reserves are on the order of a few centuries at current levels of electricity production, but much less if nuclear energy is ramped up significantly. If this is the case, there are two options that I know of:

1) Reprocess spent fuel to re-use the unspent U-235. Most of the U-235 remains unused after the first go-through, so this only makes sense. However, the Carter administration stopped reprocessing in the US due to fears over proliferation. The rest of the world continues on merrily reprocessing regardless.

2) Develop breeder reactors to make the "fertile" isotopes (Thorium, U-238) into fissionable ones. There are enormous amounts of fertile isotopes around, enough to produce electricity for thousands of years. The fear here is also proliferation, since breeders (I think) produce plutonium.

I am doing this by memory, so may have gotten some facts wrong. Correct me, if so.

newt: Environmentalists hate clean, safe nuclear power because they believe (right or wrong) that the waste that is produced is neither clean nor safe, and that there's a potential for an accident at a plant, which would also not be clean or safe.

Why is it usually assumed that "hydrogen=fuel cell?" Internal combustion engines run just fine on hydrogen--indeed, this is the approach that BMW is taking.

Problems with low energy density remain, but hydrogen-powered ICUs could power busses & local delivey trucks with relatively low infrastructure requirements. And it could be done without need for any major technological breakthroughs.

Murray -- I think you're right, but isn't it true that plutonium also gets recovered from reprocessing? It's my understanding that part of the fears from reprocessing is that plutonium is a much more potent fuel for nuclear weapons and therefore it would be that much more difficult to secure the facilities (and trucks, nuclear power plants, etc.) I think they were worried about this long before S11.

Actually, it is only some environmentalists that are ignorant of, and so oppose, nuclear power. These are usually the head-in-the-sand types that don't look at whole systems.

James Lovelock of Gaia hypothesis fame is the most recognizable pro-nuclear environmentalist but the ranks are growing. They are people who look at all the costs, benefits and dangers of various energy production methods, in great scientific detail, and see nuclear power as the safest, least environmentally damaging method of energy production.

In addition to the breeder reactor and reprocessing approaches to extending the amount of available uranium, there are new developments that allow the use of Thorium in a reactor. There is about 20 times as much Thorium available compared to Uranium, and it cannot be used in nuclear bombs. However the development of such technologies is very slow, because who wants to invest in something that is likely to never be allowed?

Let's start a rumor.

Let's say that George W. Bush is deliberately stonewalling against nuclear power because his cronies at the oil companies are afraid of the competiton. Then hire some cool, sexy looking "research scientists" from India, Asia, Africa and Arab countries (no whities) to laud the advantages of nuclear power. Pass off Chernobyl and Three Mile Island as the result of typical Nixon and Reagan white-man incompetance.

Soon, we'll have Hollywood types demanding that we have nuclear powered SUV's so they can stop driving their Prius. Micheal Moore will ranting about why there isn't a nuclear power plant on every street corner...it's all about OIL!

I can't wait for the day when I'll see tie-dyed hippies and stoners protesting for nuclear power.

Make it cool, trendy and anti-establishment enough, and I think they'd actually go for it.

There's also this recent article about hydrogen as power

It counters a lot of Lynn's shallow FUD, and even has a plan for moving to a hydrogen economy. I'm not saying who's more right (my link is overly optimistic), but there are solutions to Lynn's objections, or could be in the near future, which she would know if she bothered to investigate. If we dismissed all research out of hand because it looks hard, we wouldn't have any innovation at all.

On a side note, hydrogen is also required for the fusion reactors that are being researched (as opposed to the fission we know as "nuclear" today). Of course, this is still a ways off as well, but the link does have information on how hydrogen can be gathered. Luckily, the tritium form of hydrogen is recyclable in a well-designed fusion reactor.

Josh, do you understand the difference between the ounces of tritium & deuterium required to power the USA with fusion reactors and the millions of tons needed to provide the same power from chemical reactions?

Gumblix, sounds like a great PR campaign...

Re: fuel reprocessing and Plutonium: U235 is a much better bomb-making material than Plutonium. It takes about twice as much Pu to reach critical mass, and the bomb construction is much more difficult - Pu bombs have to divide the Pu into many blocks and precisely implode them into a single compressed mass, while U235 bombs can be as simple as two chunks of U235 at opposite ends of a pipe with a block of TNT to drive one chunk down the pipe and into the other.

On the other hand, Pu can be separated from Uranium and all the other stuff in spent nuclear fuel by purely chemical means. Some of the reactions might be pretty tricky, and quite likely they would involve flourine-based reactants that are actually more dangerous than most of the radioactive elements, but I think a good second year chem student could dive into the library and find everything needed to produce Pu in sufficient quantities for bomb-making. And you could probably do the work in a third-rate college chem lab - if you didn't mind dying. Or if you could get a few dozen assistants smart enough to follow a recipe and dumb enough to do the work without adequate shielding. So it would not be impossible for well-funded terrorists to separate Pu by themselves in some isolated location, without even the host government suspecting. Turning it into a bomb would be harder, but not impossible, given one math and physics genius dedicated to "the cause". (Sanity is not a requirement for success in math and physics!) So the best place to cut this off is at the source - by making sure they can't get the used fuel in the first place.

U235 is much, much harder to separate. Getting enough high grade for even one bomb requires a large industrial plant. (Fresh reactor fuel is not nearly rich enough for bombs, you need that big plant to further enrich it.) It's almost impossible for even an absolute dictator to build and operate something of that size secretly, and terrorists aren't going to be able to do it unless they have a lot of governmental support - the kind that gets that government capital nuked in retaliation...

But if we were really serious about saving the environment, we would build breeder reactors, reprocess fuel, and heavily guard that Plutonium. "Enviromental leaders" either are scientifically illiterate, or prefer to attract a mob with sound bites to working hard for real solutions.

The "remember the Hindenberg" line was very disappointing. Perhaps the author simply intended it as a way of pointing out that hydrogen in large quantities burns in large quantities, which proves...?

Too much irrational fear of hydrogen has been produced by that incident, even though we know now that it was probably ignited as a side effect of a separate cause. It's unfortunate that it should continue to be exploited (intentionally or otherwise).

As for how to bring about a hydrogen powered vehicle, here's my private industry solution:

http://yourword.blogspot.com/2003_03_02_yourword_archive.html#90351087

Kathrine:
I have this naive vision of our eventually using nuclear power to produce hydrogen from sea water. Can someone tell me why that wouldn't work better than getting it from hydrocarbons?

Because it'd be way too expensive. 'Making hydrogen from water' really means making hydrogen from electricity. We make electricity from uranium, but we also make it from methane -- and either way it gets sold in the same market. So we can go from methane to hydrogen, or from methane to electricity to hydrogen. The inefficiency of the extra processing steps kills the cost-effectiveness.
The way to change this would be to put a high enough carbon tax on fossil fuels, but I don't see that happening for a while.

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Murray:
However, the world has seriously limited reserves of U-235, which fission reactors require to produce electricity. I think reserves are on the order of a few centuries at current levels of electricity production, but much less if nuclear energy is ramped up significantly. If this is the case, there are two options that I know of:

1) Reprocess spent fuel [...]

2) Develop breeder reactors [...]

Also, there's lots of uranium (and thorium) in the Earth's crust --and the ocean!-- , which could be extracted if the price went up by a factor of a few. That wouldn't increase the cost of nuclear power, of which fuel is a small fraction.

=====
David Foster:
Why is it usually assumed that "hydrogen=fuel cell?" Internal combustion engines run just fine on hydrogen--indeed, this is the approach that BMW is taking.

I don't see the point. The advantage of a fuel cell is that it has much higher efficiency than an IC engine. If you're not going to exploit that why not use a cheaper, higher-density fuel like methane?

Bill -- "If you're not going to exploit that (higher efficiency of fuel cells) why not use a cheaper, higher-density fuel like methane?"

Because (a) you still get the benefit of a very clean burn, and (b) you can create hydrogen by electrolysis of water, and you can't do this with methane. I personally think hydrogen only makes sense given electrolysis and cheap electricity to power it -- either nuclear or some (still hypothetical) large-scale solar technology.

If methane can be made economically from biomass, on the other hand, things get very interesting.

"Environmentalists hate clean, safe nuclear power for reasons I can't understand."

I'm not against clean, safe nuclear power. I'm against the kind that actually exists.

People are against nuclear power because the reactors are built and run by corporations which routinely lie about matters of safety and efficiency.

Get back to me when you've figured out how to clean up the territory devastated by the Chernobyl disaster, and when you've got a safe way to deal with the waste from the reactors you want to build. (Hint: "safe" doesn't mean dumping it in a cavern somewhere and forgetting about it.)

"People are against nuclear power because the reactors are built and run by corporations which routinely lie about matters of safety and efficiency."

Actually, it's quite the opposite. The safety of nuclear power plant operation in the U.S. greatly improved when operators were given greater freedom from rigid regulation. As in most things the people on site are in a much better position to know the issues and find useful techniques for operation. Much of this was no more than sensible labeling and other user interface affordances.

Chernobyl is the classic example of why corporations rather than governments are the appropriate locus of primary responsibility. Many nations have operated facilities for decades with no problem, governments can do things well, but the mindless bashing of corporations for careless behavior fails to consider that governments are more likely to commit dangerous acts than private concerns since they have the wealth of the whole nation to buffer their blunders, and government employees are less incented to do good work than they are to avoid blame.

Orbitron:People are against nuclear power because the reactors are built and run by corporations which routinely lie about matters of safety and efficiency. Get back to me when you've figured out how to clean up the territory devastated by the Chernobyl disaster...

Ahh, the ole lefty canard of blaming "corporations" and citing a government failure for evidence. Rife with irony, this one...

Back40, I see, is much more erudite and substantially less snarky than I...

It should be pointed out that electrolyzing seawater probably produces some interesting chlorinated organic compounds, energetic compounds, and unusual metallic compounds. It almost certainly does intesting things to living organisms in the water, like breaking them open and dumping their enzymes into the water to poison sea life (the algae don't normally all turn inside out at once).

I'm not saying these are necessarily a problem, but I want to see careful scientific evidence from a pilot plant before I'd be happy running half the world's energy throw seawater. I guess I'm just a little jumpy after reading how nasty chlor-alkali plants are (add a plastic membrane to an electrolyzer and you've got a chlor-alkali machine).

back40 - high five! up high! down low!

What is unfortunate about nuclear power is that most of plants that have been built are now nearly at the end of their usable lives. This is particularly true in France where they have maybe 10 to 15 years left on the newest of its plants.

Is it any wonder France wants Iraqi oil so badly that its willing to violate UN sanctions to get it?

The irony is that one of the reasons France was pushing Kyoto was because of the belief on behalf of the Greens that nuclear power was endless and could be sold to neighboring countries who weren't so "lucky" to have a source of clean power.

Funny how environmentalists in this country would have a stroke if they knew that France wanted Kyoto so it could leverage its nuclear energy assets.

Josh:
I did a quick read of that article. The author doesn't offer any suggestions as to how the hydrogen is to be produced - just that it's 'plentiful.'
It looks like a fluff piece - long on assertions but short on facts.

But hydrogen is plentiful. Once you expend a lot of energy to split it away from those pesky carbon or hydrogen bonds, I mean.

Hydrogen is NOT a source of energy. It's a means of storing the energy. Just one means. Fusion has been ten years away from being workable for over two decades now. And when it comes, guess what? There'll be nuclear waste.

me-- "If you're not going to exploit that [higher efficiency of fuel cells] why not use a cheaper, higher-density fuel like methane?"

David Foster:
Because (a) you still get the benefit of a very clean burn, and (b) you can create hydrogen by electrolysis of water, and you can't do this with methane.

Hydrogen burns very cleanly, but you still get some nitrogen oxides, which you don't with fuel cells. And you *could* synthesize methane from energy, water and air -- it just doesn't pay to do so long as you can just get it out of a hole in the ground. But don't dismiss the higher efficiency fuel cells. If the efficiency of electrolysis runs ~80%, the fuel cell ~80%, the IC engine ~40% (which are probably all optimistic), the electrolysis-IC's overall efficiency is only ~30% while the electrolysis-fuelcell's is ~60%.

DF:
I personally think hydrogen only makes sense given electrolysis and cheap electricity to power it -- either nuclear or some (still hypothetical) large-scale solar technology.

If methane can be made economically from biomass, on the other hand, things get very interesting.

Yes, methane is made from biomass, though obviously that supply is limited.

I think for hydrogen to make sense it has to be made from unreliable souces of electricity like windpower or from nuclear plants which you want to run at full production all the time regardless of the current demand. Use the electrolyser-storagetank-fuelcell system to shift electricity from times of surplus production to times of insufficient production.

Since our hydrogen-generating nuclear plant wouldn't have to directly serve electrical customers, we could locate it far away from populated areas. Might scare people less, and give the environmentalists less leverage.

Or maybe not. After all, they get all hot and bothered over the prospect of drilling for oil out in the middle of a frozen wasteland.

The one really false note that struck me in the linked article was a reference to a shortage of water - otherwise, seemed to raise a lot of reasonable issues, and state some truths that need to be kept in mind.

"Ahh, the ole lefty canard of blaming "corporations" and citing a government failure for evidence. Rife with irony, this one..."

Sorry, but I have lived long enough to have learned that technology never works as advertised. I do not trust anyone in either the public or private sector who says they can deliver safe, clean nuclear power. The potential losses far outweight the potential gains.

I notice you didn't address my concerns about the impossibility of cleaning up the damage created by a nuclear accident, or the utter lack of credible proposals for disposing of nuclear waste safely.

I'm also waiting for the utter lack of credible proposals for the safe combustion of fossil fuels without excessive production of sulfuric acid, nitrous oxides, particulates, greenhouse gases or other nasties. But I'm not holding my breath.

As things stand now, you have nuclear power or fossil fuels. There is no third option that's present in useful quantities.

Orbitron: if you define all the proposals on the table as 'not credible', then you're obviously not going to be satisfied.

One note: Fly ash (from coal) is considerably more toxic than nuclear waste, and stays toxic forever, unlike nuclear waste, which becomes nontoxic (eventually).

Long-lived nuclear waste isn't very radioactive (it can't be, since if it was really radioactive, it would decay quickly), and isn't terribly harmful in small quantities. (Indeed, low-level nuclear waste is sometimes known as granite - granite is notorious for having small amounts of uranium present.)

There's also a fair amount of evidence that the linear dose hypothesis (e.g., if 100 units of radiation will always give you cancer, 1 unit of radiation has a 1% chance of giving you cancer) is invalid, and that low doses of radiation actually improve your health. (As with everything in life, the dose makes the poison.) There was an article in New Scientist a couple of weeks ago on this.

Personally, I don't think that the hydrogen economy is ever going to take off because there aren't any hydrogen wells handy, and the conversion costs will always outweigh the costs of oil. (The Alberta tar sands are still there, and they're huge).

markm:
You have it backwards. The critical mass for Pu-239 is about five kilograms, vs. around fifteen for U-235.

But the fears of reactor fuel making bombs are quite overblown. Due to resonance absorption, some of the Pu-239 becomes Pu-240, which is awful for bombs. The amount created goes up with the square of time in the reactor, so Pu from a power plant would need isotope separation before making proper bomb material.

Orbitron:
Your questions are too vague to answer. What, to your mind, constitutes the standard of "having cleaned up a nuclear accident," or "disposed of reactor waste safely?"

Delendam Esse Saudi Arabia!

Who knows how real the hydrogen fuel cell economy is?

I don't, but I can tell that if GM and other large automakers are investing substantial amounts of money in the technology that there exists some cost/ benfit for them in the long run.

Of course we could blame it all on the lefties in crazy california for insisting on zero-emission vehicles.

But then again, if any of you grew up in LA during the 70's you would realize that California's environmental laws have substantially reduced the number of Stage I and Stage II alert days (the ones where doctors recommended that elderly stay at home and children at school skip recess)

If you are actually interested in some trend data
http://www.aqmd.gov/smog/o3trend.html

Now that was to address a specific air quality/ health link for high levels of particulates and other smog related chemicals. Seemed to have worked pretty well.

Damm intrusive government regulations.

What are people worried about today?

global warming, (at least in the US) strategic dependence on hydrocarbons from non-US locations and overall energy efficency.

I would say that GM and other companies are investing in this technology due to the size of the California market and the current mandate for zero-emmission vechicles.

I would say that the administration sees progress in this area and is investing in this technology to see if we can reduce our dependence on foreign oil reserves. Or, they liked Al Gore's idea here.

And what about global warming?

Either it is hyped way beyond the danger it represents to mankind and we bail out of Kyoto and decide not to address this issue or there is a danger http://www.whrc.org/news/climateset.htm
and we start to recognize the importance of studying alternative way to produce and use energy more effiencently (i.e., solar, wind, better gas mileage)

$1.7 billion isn't much to start to find out.

jjj,

Haven't you heard? California is abandoning its zero emission vehicle mandate that was supposed to be in place by 2003. What they found was that they simply cannot legislate what is not technologically feasible.

Check out the NPR story here:

http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=1191605

Matt,

California isn't abondoning its zero-emission mandate. The zero emission program is part of the overall program for ultra-low emission vechicles. The program had certain goals in mind during the late 1990's to encourge development of electric or hybrid vechicles which are on the market today.

But the program's proposed changes indicate that the board realizes that the costs are not low enough for the original implementation timeline. They also recognize that fuel cell vehicles are not currently cost effective.

But the program has been modified a number of times since 1990 to take this into account.

Given the progress since 1990 in vechicle emissions (both conventional and electric - remember auto makers had to make improvements in convential emissions as well under this program) I would say it has been something of a success.

Has is brought about zero-emission vehicles for you and me?

No, but there has been substantial progress.

Its about setting up incentives and trying to reduce out impact on the environment.

You can't make any progress if you don't try, and if you don't set the right market incentives business will have no reasons to try.

Thanks for the link.

jjj

"One note: Fly ash (from coal) is considerably more toxic than nuclear waste, and stays toxic forever, unlike nuclear waste, which becomes nontoxic (eventually)."

I don't see why this is a good argument for introducing yet another type of pollutant into the environment.

Still waiting to find out what to do with the tons and tons of radioactive waste. Saying there is some slight evidence that it might be a bit less harmful than originally thought won't do.

>

Clean up nuclear accident: Restore the affected area to the state it was in prior to the accident. Remove, absorb or neutralize the radioactivity, I suppose. Sounds impossible, doesn't it? That's why I am against nuclear power. Anyway, if we do learn to do any such thing, we won't need fission power.

Dispose of nuclear waste safely: Put the material somewhere where it will not be released into the surrounding environment until it is no longer radioactive. This also sounds like a difficult undertaking.

jjj,

Admitedly my knowledge of California's Zero Emission program is basically limited to the NPR article. However, I got the impression that the mandate wasn't an incentive but a requirement.

Regardless, I think there's a very elementary question involved here -- that is: would private industry advance itself absent of government requirement or incentive?

Discounting any "Innovator's Dilemmas," I think that most companies will advance technology on their own. By your comments, I take it you believe that government is needed to encourage technological development.

Therefore, I wonder what the other readers think: would GM, Ford and others develop a zero emission vehicle if there was no government mandate like the one in California? Would same companies invest in hydrogen powered vehicles if government didn't invest as well?

Orbitron: You should research the faulty design factors in the RBMK reactor which lead to the Chernobyl disaster, before citing that disaster as a blanked refutation against the safety of nuclear power. Start by Googling "RBMK positive void coefficient." There were other flaws in the design, but that one was the worst.

The nuclear waste storage is a more troublesome issue, we have yet to see whether the option at Yucca Mountain works in the long term.

Daniel Newby: You don't stick two electrodes in the sea with gas collectors over each. The seawater is a plentiful source, but you pump the water to a processing plant. (These would need fantastic amounts of stainless steel, though = expensive to install). The potential pollutants are a valid concern, but they do not necessarily just end up back in the sea.

Ken: The ANWR arguments were many times more complex than what you just made them out to be. Put that dog back outside ;-)

Eric Brown: Wait until that nuclear waste corrodes through a supposedly safe container and gets into the groundwater. Presently the majority of US nuclear waste has been stored in on-site holding ponds because we don't have another place to put it. Permanent storage is still in its infancy due to (among other things) NIMBY politics.

The problems are complex: Is the site truly geologically stable? What about surface water permeation? Will that water encounter salt deposits which will then corrode the containers? If a container does leak, what are the odds that it could eventually permeate down into groundwater? Etc.

As for flyash, it is mostly silicates, and very dangerous IF INHALED IN SIGNIFICANT QUANTITIES (causes lung hardening). When compacted in a designated dumping site it doesn't do much, and even minor amounts inhaled (although not recommended) are typically not dangerous if there is no reptitive exposure. One entreupreneur has discovered a way to make bricks from the stuff, although I don't know if they're on the market yet or not.

"Orbitron: You should research the faulty design factors in the RBMK reactor which lead to the Chernobyl disaster, before citing that disaster as a blanked refutation against the safety of nuclear power. Start by Googling 'RBMK positive void coefficient.' There were other flaws in the design, but that one was the worst."

I know that the Chernobyl reactor was poorly designed. I'm sure US reactors are much better. I wasn't using it as an example of reactor safety. I was using the Chernobyl disaster as an example of the impossibility of cleaning up after a release of radioactive material into the environment.

Look, near me there is a nuclear power plant right on some of the most beautiful coastline you could ever hope to see. It's never had an accident, as far as I know. But it's built on top of an earthquake fault, which strikes me as pretty damn stupid. It's also nearing the end of its useful life, which means it's soon going to be too radioactive to use. So it's just going to sit there, blighting the landscape. I don't think that is acceptable, even if that reactor is quite "safe" by the standards of the pro-fission power crowd.

I did a quick read of that article. The author doesn't offer any suggestions as to how the hydrogen is to be produced - just that it's 'plentiful.'
It looks like a fluff piece - long on assertions but short on facts.

I never said that it would be easy, or even viable. I only said that the originally linked article was long on assertions and short on facts. It's hardly a fluff piece since it cites specific technologies that may address the problems posed in the original article. However, obtaining pure hydrogen in the first place is a true problem, one that may be solved in the future.

I'm not advocating an immediate push to convert everything to hydrogen. But I do think that we should research it. The original article states that we should abandon all hope of ever using hydrogen, which is silly.

Fusion has been ten years away from being workable for over two decades now. And when it comes, guess what? There'll be nuclear waste.

I didn't say it was coming soon or that it will be a panacea. People who actually understand the topic know that research is progressing steadily, and are not deterred just because early enthusiasm was unjustified and premature.

The waste generated by fusion is much better than fission. First, it generates a lot less of it; it is an indirect byproduct, not a direct one (the direct byproduct is helium). Second, the type of waste has a much shorter lifetime: decades, not millenia. Finally, the failure mode is much more acceptable. It burns out in a few seconds, and has no sustainable reaction outside the controlled environment.

Matt,

What I agree with is a concept called "externalities." For those unfamiliar (and I am no expert on this) the idea is that there sometimes exists costs that are not covered in the price of a good, but borne by society.

http://www.bized.ac.uk/virtual/dc/copper/theory/th19.htm
http://www.iclei.org/EFACTS/ECONOMIC.HTM

A good example is the cost of providing health care to people that smoke. It is very clear that smoking causes all sorts of health care problems that are either billed to insurance companies or centralized health care systems (or you just suffer and eventually go to the emergency room if you have no insurance). Any way you cut it, the additional costs to society of providing care to smokers is not covered by the price of the cigarette and not payed by the tobacco companies (this is a little, and I repeat a little, less true these days).

So in steps the government. The tobacco companies have no incentive to produce "healthy" cigarettes or to stop producing them.

California's clean air legislation is another example. Cars that produce lots of pollution result in smog and serious health consequences for people that live in these areas (and global warming and dependence on foreign oil).

Zero emission cars are not currently feasible and investments in this area will not be financially justified (in terms of ROI) unless the automakers have no choice. One could argue that given a few hundred years we will run out of fossil fuels and be forced to come up with new technologies or if you wait long enough someone might invent a clean energy source. But this argument doesn't take into account the externalities.

California is trying to put incentives in place to force automakers to invest and correct this particular externality.

I was using the Chernobyl disaster as an example of the impossibility of cleaning up after a release of radioactive material into the environment.

...which IMO is still rather circular if the safer design is not likely to fail in the first place, or release such material even if disaster occurs on account of having a well-designed containment structure.

To review, Chernobyl had an inherently faulty design that was prone to a run-away failure; it did not have a proper containment structure; and even if it had been blessed with such, its design also required a graphite core, which under meltdown conditions could react with water to rapidly form hydrogen and then explode with sufficient force to destroy a containment vessel and scatter radioactive material.

"...which IMO is still rather circular if the safer design is not likely to fail in the first place, or release such material even if disaster occurs on account of having a well-designed containment structure."

The potential damage is too great to risk it, as far as I'm concerned. I don't care how safe reactor designs are in principle. In practice, no plan is foolproof, contractors cut corners, and real-world behavior always varies from theory.

Don't forget we're not talking about just one facility. More like hundreds, if not thousands all over the world, each one an opportunity for that one unlikely disatrous failure to crop up.

Then there is the possibility of deliberate sabotage. What a nice opportunity to spread a little death a fission power plant would give a freedom fighter.

And of course I still wonder what to do with all the deadly radioactive waste that even the safest reactors produce.

I didn't say it was coming soon or that it will be a panacea. People who actually understand the topic know that research is progressing steadily, and are not deterred just because early enthusiasm was unjustified and premature.

I admit I haven't paid much attention to the issue, since I discovered that most of the laser-fusion hype was simply that...in an effort to maintain funding.

The waste generated by fusion is much better than fission. First, it generates a lot less of it; it is an indirect byproduct, not a direct one (the direct byproduct is helium). Second, the type of waste has a much shorter lifetime: decades, not millenia. Finally, the failure mode is much more acceptable. It burns out in a few seconds, and has no sustainable reaction outside the controlled environment.

Actually, there are several problems with this paragraph. First, the byproduct of fusion processes being investigated most vigorously is not He-4. It's other, heavier elements, frequently unstable (meaning, things that decay radioactively). I'd have to go do a little research, but the first thing that springs to mind is the product of deuterium-tritium fusion, which is (as you say) He-4 and a neutron. The neutron, as I recall, contains a significant fraction of the reaction energy, and impacts the container wall, resulting in formation of radioactive isotopes there.

I do have to admit that there is some potential for completely nonradioactive fusion, notably the hydrogen-boron fusion. Apparently some progress has been made on this front recently, but I can't say if they're any closer to breakeven than classic deuterium-tritium approach.

Finally, the "sustained reaction" bit. Fission reactors cannot sustain outside the reactor vessel. Fusion reactors can't, either, but neither can they yet sustain themselves inside a reactor. The primary difference here is that in the event of a runaway type reactor failure, the nuclear fuel in a fission reactor will become hot enough to melt itself and the walls of any containment vessels, which make it possible for the fuel to come into direct contact with groundwater, and for radioactive gases to escape to the atmosphere. There is no sustained reaction outside of the reactor.

Orbitron:

Okay, that's a fair view, although personally I think we take far greater risks every day, and IF humans are having an impact on the earth's current warming trend...well, fossil fuels aren't going to cut it in the long run, and renewable resources are limited in scope. That doesn't leave too many other options.

Orbitron said

Dispose of nuclear waste safely: Put the material somewhere where it will not be released into the surrounding environment until it is no longer radioactive. This also sounds like a difficult undertaking.

The link I gave is just one of the proposals; if there's enough waste to worry about (meaning, we actually use fission power to a reasonable extent) and the government lifts its heavy foot from the reprocessing of partially-burned fuel, the economics of the situation will lead directly to the desired result.

Orbitron:
You say that nuclear waste will be disposed of safely when we "Put the material somewhere where it will not be released into the surrounding environment until it is no longer radioactive."

OK, simple. a) put in torpedo like cylinders.

b) Drop into sea bed. The stuff penetrates into the ocean floor, and stays there. (courtesy Luis Alvarez, Nobel Laureate, physics).

Cleaning up nuclear accident sites I know less about, but it doesn't sound impossible. The radioactive waste products are certain isotopes of certain elements. Ought to be possible to leach them out of the soil.

I must say I'm puzzled by your seeming blithe willingness to accept any hazard, as long as it's been around for a while, but insistence on total safety for anything new.

anony-mouse:
How long is "the long run?" In about six hundred years, nuclear waste has decayed to the point that it's about as radiocative as natural uranium ores.

Of course, the big problem with Yucca Mountain is that we're not allowed to find out how it would work.

Hi Katherine...not having taken the time to read all the comments I probably risk repetition, however nuclear facilities represent a security, rather than a safety, issue. Perhaps using solar power to generate the electricity needed for hydrogen production would reduce this risk. Also the developement of decentralised hydrogen based power generation (e.g. cars)could and should start redressing some of the imbalances created in the world by the developed nations dominance of the energy resources. Good discussion. Thanks for the question.

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