The real something for nothing

[The Grand Nudger]

The bottom line is that alternatives are now cheaper and more profitable than fossil fuels even in the face of vast subsidies to fossil fuels which : checks notes : we hate.

Gas vehicles are going to hold out longer in rural areas and junkyards, like your own, ofc. There's still value to wring out of the mess. I could get you a good deal on a horse drawn carriage from my neighbors, if you're interested.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

How can you pretend to have an informed opinion when you clearly haven’t informed yourself?

Boru

And when are you going to realize you don' t know this country as well as the people who live here?

Bottom line with American businesses - is the bottom line. Money. Everything else sucks hind tit. 

They will spout ideals - give you a million plausable reasons - but ultimately it' s about the money.

About this, I know more than you do, apparently. The private companies that own the nuclear plants don’t pay anything to store waste on-site - the federal government foots the bill (meaning you). Why? Because it’s the law, and has been for 40 years. Building, operating and funding nuclear waste disposal sites wouldn’t cost power companies a penny.

Look stuff up once in a while.

Boru

[Paleophyte]

Uh huh.....

And WHY hasn' t ANY of it been done in 60 damned years? 60 YEARS....


Because - it COSTS MONEY.


And the people running these plamts make a.profit by virtue of you believing that they' ll do the right thing and take care of it.....any day now.....


Bwaaaaahahahaha

....

Jesus - the things some people will believe.....

It's not a money issue. It's not a technical issue. It's not a safety issue. It's a political issue. 

It's all of the above. One of the big technical and safety issues is that glasses are only metastable. When you make glass containing unstable nuclides the radiation damage rapidly converts the glass into a fine powder that's much trickier to contain or handle safely. Even converting the waste to ceramic or high tensile strength minerals such as zircons fails to prevent this.

A more effective approach is to sort by half-life and dispose accordingly. Short-lived isotopes go into an RTG, which is much more useful than warming the waters of some spent fuel pool, and decay to stable isotopes before your grandkids get grey hairs. Long-lived isotopes will require disposal in a nuclear incinerator, a high-neutron flux reactor designed to either burn them as fuel or convert them to less stable, shorter-lived isotopes. As a bonus, you would almost certainly produce significant amounts of energy from reacting the transuranic waste products. Aside from the politics, which is a farce, this will require money and some smart technological solutions.

Read up on Yucca Mountain. Stalled by NIMBY-thinking and people who don't understand basic science and are smug about it.

Yucca was killed by politics but was a bad idea from the start. No great surprise seeing as it was born of politics. The area is tectonically active, prone to both earthquakes and volcanism. Yucca Mountain is the surface expression of one of these faults. The volcanic rocks from which it was formed are faulted and fractured, with subsequent hydrothermal alteration further weakening the strata and making it permeable. This is pretty much textbook everything you want to avoid in a geological repository but was chosen because it wasn't in anybody's backyard except for a handy military base. For geological repositories you want to look for areas with no active tectonics and highly impermeable rock. The cratonic rock beneath northern Minnesota would be ideal.

[Spongebob]

My neighborhood has a ban on solar panels on homes. The policy is driven by aesthetics of course. But how foolish is that? My next home will not be limited by such nonsense.

[Fireball]

I live in an all-but-inactive HOA. We have a nice clubhouse, tennis courts, pools, etc. We have solar panels all over the neighborhood. I'm in California, and I seem to recall that an HOA may not restrict the installation of solar panels. It went pretty high in the courts and the HOAs got their asses handed to them. I personally don't want solar yet because of the RoI. They generally degrade below a useful level before the mortgage is paid. Nice for power outages, so if that's common where you're at, and get plenty of insolation in your location, it might be reasonable for you.

[arewethereyet]

Do we really need two "something for nothing" threads? Both are nothing but pissing contests between the same players.

[Fireball]

Do we really need two "something for nothing" threads?  Both are nothing but pissing contests between the same players.

What happened to the 3rd one!?

[Spongebob]

Do we really need two "something for nothing" threads?  Both are nothing but pissing contests between the same players.

That was not my intention.  I created it as a place for an actual conversation about the pros and cons of alternative power sources and what was likely to happen in the future.  Sort of a counter weight to WLB's thread that was nothing but his own personal bitching session.  But of course it's impossible to guide a conversation.

---

I'm curious if there are any downsides to solar panels? Are there materials in the PV's that are difficult to dispose of when they are eventually retired? I suppose you could say there's a lot of plastic in there that has to be properly taken care of so it doesn't end up floating in the ocean.

[The Grand Nudger]

In theory, not many. In practice - alot. It starts with the materials. For awhile they used manufacturing waste as an input - but that time is long gone as demand blew past that supply. The leading industry watchdog was captured by it's filthiest producers over the course of this shift...and dirty solar accounts for the majority of panels today with glowing environmental reviews written by the pr wing of that set. Then there's cost and maintenance and disposal. Final, there's the issue of productivity.

In my experience, these are the sorts of things that lead to reservations in people who very much want to get into solar. It's harder to understand coop hesitancy..aside from pure cost..which is still a thing. In the end, the cost hesitant will just sign up after the rest of us payed the upfront. Or, at least, that's how it's getting set up out here.

[Spongebob]

There's also solar concentration plants, of which the US now has 5 according to Wiki. This is an interesting energy source in that it doesn't rely on PV cells but rather the sun's heat as a substitute for burning fossil fuels or nuclear.