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From: todd@scirtp.UUCP (Todd Jones)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Oil and the costs of Fission Electricity
Message-ID: <528@scirtp.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 30-Oct-85 11:23:16 EST
Article-I.D.: scirtp.528
Posted: Wed Oct 30 11:23:16 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Nov-85 03:27:45 EST
References: <460@mhuxm.UUCP> <740@whuxl.UUCP> <10822@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: SCI Systems, Research Triangle Park, NC
Lines: 95

> The only feasible alternatives to oil are natural gas, coal, and atomic energy

How about a little bit of conservation?

> Of the three, coal is very dirty and natural gas suffers from
> transportation difficulties.  
> Fission energy is here right now, is competitive with oil in price/kw-hr, 

I think fission power is becoming less and less of a bargain.
You say,"That's because all you worrywarts are regulating it death!"

> and is very clean...

You mean it is very clean unless it becomes very, very dirty.

> but is politically incorrect, for some reason I've never been able to fathom.

How about this reason: Nuclear power plants cannot be insured through
conventional routes, i.e., insurance companies set insurance rates so
high that nuclear power becomes prohibitively expensive. Do the power
companies listen to the advice of people who are professional odds makers?
Noooo. Instead of realizing it is not cost-efficient (when you calculate
the possibility of and cost of system failure), the politicians decided
to let the power companies distribute the costs of failure to all American
power consumers. This means I am paying (through Duke Power Company)
for the clean-up of the "incident" at TMI, even though I have no voice
in General Municipal Utilities actions. Any sane observer will admit
that the "incident" was miniscule compared to the level of potential
catastrophe. 

I am not a blanket anti-nuker. I think it should be implemented, but not
in any way like the American power companies are pursuing it. American
utilities, politicians and electricity consumers are not being realistic
regarding the costs of nuclear power. In addition to the above mentioned
shared clean-up costs, we are not being realistic about:

   waste storage. I believe we are technologically able (probably) to
   safely store wastes, but there are too many horror stories about
   unsafe disposal practices, hundreds of pounds of unaccounted for
   wastes, including weapons grade plutonium. The technological
   requirements for creating a storage system that can withstand the
   ravages of tens of thousands of years of time are boggling.
   We are giving our children (and grandchildren, etc...) a poisonous
   legacy, generated to fuel an economic system that will be hilariously
   inefficient and crude to them.

   cost of total failure. In the event of a meltdown (a real possibility
   by anyone's reckoning) the consequences will range from catastrophic
   to cataclysmic, depending on who you talk to. When you consider the
   price, is it worth it?

> Perhaps some of the groups that are opposed to our
> current buildup should redirect their energies to 
> ending political restrictions on the development of fission power.

> 					Rick.

I'll be the first to admit that coal power is poisonous and crude.
What we need is research (I don't care who funds it, really) on
renewable energy sources. Why can't we push solar more? It wouldn't have
anything to do with power companies fear's of decentralized power
sources would it? Nah!

The French have taken the most realistic approach to implementing
fission power. They have standardized all their plants, so that
each plant is an improvement on its predecessor. Obviously the French
have more at stake than we do, as they get something close to 70% their
electron juice from nukes, we get less than 20. Our power companies
each throw together their own kludge reactors, most of which are
clumsy, large scale versions of Rickover's nuclear sub reactors,
each of which has its own bugs and ideosyncracies (many of which
don't reveal themselves until it's too late.

I talk to my old red neck high school buddies who work on the 
Shearon-Harris nuclear power plant near Raleigh, NC. They get
high or drunk nearly everyday, they fudge inspection report
forms, they have a good old time putting together a device
that requires significant amounts of energy and control just
to keep from exploding. BTW, if you're wondering how they pass
urinalysis tests- they bring clean samples everyday from a
non-drug-using friend or SO. I don't feel too confident.

Maybe Fusion power will liberate us all from this dilemna, maybe
decentralized power (solar, wind, cow manure *8-}, etc...) will
be the answer. Until we have a clear answer, we must conserve,
use clean power (hydroelectric, domestic natural gas), and put
a lot of resources into energy research, especially fusion and
solar.

   |||||||  Mommy, help!
   ||/ \|| /
   [ O-O ]/      Todd Jones
    \ ^ /        {decvax,akgua}!mcnc!rti-sel!scirtp!todd      
    | O |
    |___|        SCI Systems Inc. doesn't necessarily agree with Todd.