CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
August 25, 2009 07:31 PM UTC
46 Comments
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Unless we can solve three (related) things:
1. The huge impact of uranium mining
2. The huge cost of waste disposal
3. The limited availability of usable uranium
Breeder reactors would help, some. But, ultimately, nuclear fission is also a “fossil fuel” (uranium is the fossil of billions-of-years-old supernovae).
Now, nuke plants using local resources on the moon, asteroids, or Mars, on the other hand…
Coal has all of those problems and then some. I believe that coal ash is more radioactive than many kinds of uranium ore.
However, it does not make sense to switch to something just because it is a little “less bad.”
Renewables – solar, wind, tide, etc. – are the way to go for new energy on this planet. Well, and geothermal (which is “fossil” but unlikely to be used up in millions of years).
The pollution from uranium mining, the disruption from a nuclear accident, the risk we’re willing to take with long-term storage of nuclear waste, all need to be compared to the potential disruption of global warming.
Sure, solar and wind may eventually be able to provide 90+% of our energy needs, but when will that be? I honestly don’t know and doubt that anyone does. But we can build nukes now. They’re a proven technology, albeit with a lot of baggage.
Personally, I’d rather see a large nuke built than a coal plant.
How many terrorists would drool at the thought of blowing up a American nuclear plant?
The site would have to be locked down and guarded like a military installation. Blowing up a solar panel doesn’t have the same consequences as blowing up a nuclear plant.
not blowing up the reactor. Reactors have containment domes built with concrete several feet thick. I recall reading that they’re designed to withstand a jet crashing into them.
And as for proliferation, well, North Korea and Iran appear to be close to developing homegrown nukes. They didn’t have to steal fissionable material from anywhere, just pay AQ Khan and his cronies for the knowledge. If those countries can get the wherewithal to build nukes, anybody can.
It takes years to build a nuclear power plant and get it up and running. Wind and solar are much faster.
Not against nuclear in all circs, but speed is not one of its advantages.
But I’ll borrow a canard from our conservative friends and say that a great deal of that time is spent getting the permit. I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that a nuke could be built in about the same time as it takes to build a coal plant. So there probably is some slop in the system that could be tightened up to speed up the process.
And like I said below, nukes can provide reliable base load power that wind and solar can’t. I recall hearing that balancing loads across the grid with significant wind and solar inputs is quite difficult even their contribution is <20%. I can only imagine what it is when they provide the majority of our power.
was that so many of these facilities were one offs.
For cost, speed and safety standardizing the design is critical.
Did somebody ever do it? Folks at Los Alamos, perhaps? Or maybe the French?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/…
They are now working on a new Euro-standard design 1600MWe.
First health care, and now nuclear reactors!
What’s next, trains?
before I’ll warm to generating nuke waste that just stacks up in a depository somewhere. Anyone want to live next to a nuke dump?
going on about nuclear
And Udall is obviously one who carefully studies which way the winds are blowing. I guess that makes him an expert on wind generated power.
All you have to ask people is where in their district they want to see the nuke built. But if you’re going to do more about global warming than buy a Prius and switch to compact flourescents, you need to start asking a lot of hard questions. The answers won’t always be easy.
I’d rather see rolling hills of solar panels than another nuke, but I don’t think the grid is able to function yet without some sort of stable base-load generating capability.
So Udall is open to discussing nuclear power. Good for him. It shows he’s thinking globally about this slow motion train wreck we call global warming. I wish more people did.
Is stable base-load generating.
You do have to be very careful about groundwater contamination (hot geothermal water contains many dissolved minerals that you do not want to drink).
But we have hundreds of gigawatts of untapped, sustainable (over the lifetime of a civilization) power beneath our feet.
GT is not “clean”, but rather “cleaner” when it comes to greenhouse gases (I’m still a fan however)
In addition, I thought GT was limited to only certain locations (tectonic or volcanic activity in general), but that makes a good choice for California (unlike IMAO Nukes in CA)
There are only a handful of geothermal power plants in this country that I’m aware of and none of them are terribly large.
If the potential exists to exploit that much power economically, we definitely should. I wasn’t aware that the potential exists. Do you have a source with some numbers?
Only about 10 or so gigawatts are easily accessible – about 5% of the projected total. There is research ongoing about how to extract the dry rock heat that accounts for the other 95%
Some info can be found at http://www.geo-energy.org/abou…
But – how easy is it going to be to reclaim coal and uranium mining sites to their actual original state?
being an expert in wind generated power.
He stays in power by always going in the direction generated by the winds of public opinion.
It would be impressive if he would actually produce some rational legislation to our sustainable needs. That would be a welcome change.
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In fact, 100 25 MWe pebble-bed reactors, each the size of a hot tub, could power this city adequately.
Safe. Reliable, Cheap.
You know all that talk about “peak oil” and “Huppert’s curve” and price being a function of supply and demand ?
I’d recommend moving away from any town that opposes nuke power. You won’t be able to eat there in 20 years.
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than coal, which is the main fossil fuel that nuclear power substitutes for in the power grid. (The other other peacetime use of nuclear power is to generate electricity to power military submarines, aircraft carriers, and perhaps a few Russian icebreaker ships).
When a nuclear power plant is running it is essentially emission free. The amount of fuel transportation and mining involve is much smaller (and hence safer per unit of energy created) because nuclear fuel is far more energy dense than coal (it takes about one pickup truck load of uranium a year to fuel a nuclear power plant and many long trainloads of coal to fuel a comparable coal fired plant).
The volume of waste is much less, low level nuclear waste (which is the bulk of nuclear waste by volume) isn’t that different in environmental threat than coal ash which can be toxic itself, and the high level nuclear waste problem is as much political as it is practical.
Nuclear isn’t the only part of the solution. We need to develop renewables like wind. We need to improve conservation and vehicle fuel efficiency. But, it is a sensible part of the total solution.
How many lives have been lost in the US due to nuclear? Zero – and that includes using it on warships.
How many people die from coal every year? I think the respitory deaths due to the emmissions are estimated to be 50 – 100K/year.
In that trade-off I think nuclear wind hands down.
Dozens of deaths and thousands of illnesses due to mining.
http://www.deseretnews.com/art…
for one example. Coal, of course, is much worse.
If I had my druthers, we’d make up the intermediate shortfall via conservation while we ramp up renewables. But I’m pretty sure people don’t have that kind of discipline, sadly.
and fuel transportation related deaths and injuries per power generated.
Throw in pollution effects for the general public and it isn’t even close.
If carbon could be captured and sequestered permanently (and geologists will tell you that is possible) wouldn’t cleaning up coal be better than the Pandora’s box of a massive nuclear power construction campaign?
A lot of money has been poured into clean coal, with not a lot to show for it. Nothing beyond pilot projects.
So perhaps the question is, can coal be clean and economical?
Then all you’d have to deal with is ash, sulfuric acid (acid rain from the sulfur in coal), mercury, arsenic, and a lot of other bad stuff. Carbon sequestration helps with the global warming aspects, not with the poisons.
Also–no matter what “geologists will tell you” (and I are one), nothing is permanent. I can’t even imagine a responsible geologist saying that.
like synthetic natural gas, but the waste you make in producing it has to end up somewhere. You shift pollution from point of use to point of fuel production, where you might be better able to control it.
Still, simply mining coal kills far more peopple than nuclear power has in all respects combined, per power generated.
The main edge nuclear power has over coal is energy density (much more energy per volume of fuel) and that edge is fundamental.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclear…
Written by physicists at the UNiversity of Melbourne, unaffiliated with the nuclear industry, under the rigours of peer review.
No time to summarize this, but it makes for a great resouce.
It has no discussion that I’ve been able to find on the impact of uranium mining. Which is of particular interest to northern Colorado voters…. http://www.nunnglow.com/
All costs (environmental & money) must be addressed from all sources (mining, building, generation, disposal) to adequately internalize the externalities.
The extractive industries do not have a great track record of being environmentally friendly on their own so tough enforcement and strong regulations are critical if we are to analyze true costs and make real choices on our energy future.
For as much as I like technologies such as wind, solar and GT, our energy future, and even more importantly the climates future, depend on bringing down CO2 emmissions faster than those technologies alone can do.
to a nuclear information center, an industry-run shack, in the state where I lived. They talked about what a great source of power nuclear energy is. This was before Three Mile Island or Chernobyl (or Jackson Browne/Bruce Springsteen singing No Nukes or whatever), and I was a pre-teen, but I could still tell I was being bullshitted, propagandized to.
I’m a little more circumspect now; I mean, I saw the 60 Minutes segment about France’s nuclear power plants, and I went, “Hmmm…”
Yet I can’t escape the sensation that I’m still being bullshitted, in the long run.
I recall what Robert Anton Wilson once said: the closest naturally-occurring nuclear power plant (the sun) to Earth is 149.6 million kilometers away: which is maybe how far nuclear power ought to be from our planet.
Then we went through the nukes-are-bad indoctrination. And quite honestly, I still think that nukes are bad. But I think that global warming is worse. Can you imagine the disaster a place like Bangladesh will be?
Ultimately, we’ll figure this out and draw our power from a series of renewable sources (we’ll have to), but in the meanwhile I don’t think we should absolutely reject nukes.
What bothers me most is that utilities are these centralized entities. If we can decentralize our power generation, then we actually become more secure and less beholden to some corporation located 5 states away.
First building large plants is a lot more efficient. Second, you can load balance because when needs go up in one part of the country, they tend to go down in others.
Transmission loss, for one. That’s bad enough for conventional power plants (including nukes), but is likely worse for alternative energy because you can’t control where the sun shines or the wind blows or the ground is hot enough.
Also, decentralized power is much less likely to suffer from regional black-outs or brownouts.
This isn’t to say I disagree with you, but rather that the efficiencies of centralized utilities are offset, at least in part, by their disadvantages.
You don’t want one on every corner, but you also don’t want a single one for all of Boulder.
You have two choices for most of our electrical generation – coal or nuclear. Wind and solar can’t generate the totals we need (yet). Add to that the fact that they’re not on 100% of the time which increases the number of generators needed.
And for those against nuclear – is it due to a logical weighing out of the laternatives, or because nuclear sounds scary?
You’re forgetting natural gas.
Since you’re such a big proponent, are you going to give Udall props for being a leader on this issue? Or do you just criticize him constantly for his mistakes, while not giving him credit when it’s due?
In another comment
1:00 p.m. Thursday – Town Hall on Building a Clean Energy Economy in Southwestern Colorado
What: Senator Udall will discuss how the use of clean energy can create jobs and boost the economy in Southwestern Colorado.
Where: La Plata County Courthouse, Anasazi Room, 1060 E. 2nd Ave., Durango
Big question – is this a speech or did his announcement say he will be answering questions? (Do you have a link?)
And where did he publisize this?
He “publisized” this with multiple releases sent to media statewide. The Durango Herald has a story on it today here http://durangoherald.com/secti… :
Organizing for America also e-mail blasted an invitation to the town hall and urged supporters to show up.
There have been stories about the planned town hall dating back to Aug. 7 in the Denver Post, on 9News, and in lots of southwestern Colorado newspapers.
Udall also held a telephone town hall on health care and — gasp! — took questions from callers, much like the rest of the delegation. You can listen here: http://markudall.senate.gov/?p…
hopefully this will become a habit.
We can put up a gazillion wind turbines easily enough. But we need a way to store that energy when the sun doesn’t blow.
Similar situation for solar for nighttime. I know that some of the thermal-solar plans address this. Not sure if anyone has doen anything with wind – maybe a paired wind/hydro project where you pump water uphill on windy days?