Trading An Addiction To Oil For An Addiction To Uranium? Why Not Ditch The Dealer-

Both Uranium and Petroleum involve extracting fuel from the ground, processing it, transporting it, dealing with waste. A lot of energy is expended just transporting stuff great distances.

Both involve highly centralized distributors who make massive amounts of money delivering energy that is necessary for modern life to continue.

Building nuclear plants costs massive amounts of money. It also requires a degree of oversight and regulation that is absent from the United States. But getting back to the money-

The money spent on building nuclear plants would be better spent retrofitting infrastructure and investing in Green Technology.

A main difference between Greener Technologies and Petro/Nuke is that the former involves collecting or harnessing energy on a more local level while the latter involves extracting energy from sources often far from ones home.

There is one method of producing oil locally that involves COLLECTING LOCAL WASTE and turning it into oil- thermal depolymerization. You get more energy out than is put in because energy isn't spent driving the water out before processing. This could be done on a municipal level. You go to the dump with your plastic bottles and fill up with oil made from those bottles at the filling station next door.

I see going nuclear as simply trading one destructive addiction for another. All that changes is the drug dealer.

History

Thermal depolymerization is similar to the geological processes that produced the fossil fuels used today, except that the technological process occurs in a timeframe measured in hours. Until recently, the human-designed processes were not efficient enough to serve as a practical source of fuel—more energy was required than was produced.

Many previous methods which create hydrocarbons through depolymerization used dry materials (or anhydrous pyrolysis), which requires expending a lot of energy to remove water. However, there has been work done on hydrous pyrolysis methods, in which the depolymerization takes place with the materials in water. In U. S. patent 2,177,557, issued in 1939, Bergstrom and Cederquist discuss a method for obtaining oil from wood in which the wood is heated under pressure in water with a significant amount of calcium hydroxide added to the mixture. In the early 1970s Herbert R. Appell and coworkers worked with hydrous pyrolysis methods, as exemplified by U. S. patent 3,733,255 (issued in 1973), which discusses the production of oil from sewer sludge and municipal refuse by heating the material in water, under pressure, and in the presence of carbon monoxide.

An approach that exceeded break-even was developed by Illinois microbiologist Paul Baskis in the 1980s and refined over the next 15 years (see U. S. patent 5,269,947, issued in 1993). The technology was finally developed for commercial use in 1996 by Changing World Technologies (CWT). Brian S. Appel (CEO of CWT) took the technology in 2001 and expanded and changed it into what is now referred to as TCP (Thermal Conversion Process), and has applied for several patents (see, for example, published patent application US 2004/0192980). A Thermal Depolymerization demonstration plant was completed in 1999 in Philadelphia by Thermal Depolymerization, LLC, and the first full-scale commercial plant was constructed in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards (100 m) from ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball turkey plant, where it is expected to process about 200 tons of turkey waste into 500 barrels (21,000 US gallons or 80 m³) of oil per day.

Solar is the way to go for energy freedom

Is the military still using depleted uranium in the Middle East? Perhaps they are planning for future *pre-emptive strikes*? After all, Exxon hasn't sucked out every ounce of oil from the Middle East yet, have they? They'll be needing more DU in the future, yes? :sarcasm:

Do you really think you could produce a significant amount of energy on the garbage that you produce?

plutonium 239 does. Much smaller amounts and FAR deadlier than dealing with garbage.

But again, that's not an issue. Garbage doesn't get produced fast enough to provide the energy needs of this country.

We have whole lakes of the stuff.

Consider the waste that you produce in a day. Do you think you produce enough to power the electricity you use in a day?

But you go right ahead with the spin. :eyes:

expensive, so they've got us by the balls.

they will continue to do it in a boutique-y way, but if they really did it big, cost would go down, and technological improvements would accelerate, making it easier for people to make their own electricity at home if power companies tried the kind of extortion they did here in California around 2000.

But you can't drill your own oil well, dig your own coal mine, or build your own nuclear plant in your backyard if electricity from those sources gets too expensive.

Putting billions into nuclear plant construction will remove that money from investment in and development of alternative energy technology.

There is method to this madness.

Building nuclear plants costs massive amounts of money. It also requires a degree of oversight and regulation that is absent from the United States."

This statement is simply not true. The oversight and regulation for the building and operation of nuclear power plants in this country - and others, notably Japan and France - is stringent and virtually never overlooked.

This statement is simply not true:

"The oversight and regulation for the building and operation of nuclear power plants in this country - and others, notably Japan and France - is stringent and virtually never overlooked."

You cannot possibly have worked in a technical area in any industry, as you would know from experience that safety is the LAST area of concern of executives who run the show.

About thirty five years ago I worked in a technical area in a hospital. When I read nowadays that an estimated 100,000 people die every year from being in a hospital due to causes that have nothing to do with their original reason for seeking medical care, my first thought is that the estimate has to be grossly underestimating the true number.

As for safety inspections, I always wondered how so many easily identified safety violations in that hospital were overlooked by safety inspectors. Even though the inspections were supposed to be random and unannounced, employees always knew at least a couple of days in advance when an inspection was going to happen. It was also interesting how the inspector always found a lot of nitpicking violations to complain about, while ignoring the choicest gross violations.

Moreover, I worked as a computer programmer for many years doing both business and technical programming. I would conservatively estimate, that half the software out there is bug ridden, insecure crap. Not that I am complaining. I know how badly the software out there is because I made my living for many years fixing other people's mistakes. Having worked on in-house written software, as well as software that was written to sell, I can confidently say that Microsoft has no monopoly on crappy software.

Since computers and software play a large part in monitoring and controlling any industrial process, including nuclear power generation, and since most organizations are run by people with business degrees and little technical background, and since the overarching goals of executives are cutting costs and maximizing profits, any normally intelligent person should be appalled and outraged that the powers-that-be are even contemplating building another nuclear power plant.