Comments on: Obama's energy pick endorses nukes, clean coal

While emphasizing that the Energy Dept. should promote energy efficiency through new tech, Steven Chu says nuclear power and clean coal should be part of the plan.

[siliconwiz]

It sounds like He is a good choice.

[Manhattan2]

What do we do with the transuanic elements. Solar Power will be the final best solution. Why not get there now instead of 30 years from now. Solar Transfer can get us there.

[Seaspray0]

I agree. I'm sure wind and solar proponents will scream, but wind and solar currently isn't capable of providing the large scale amounts of power within a few years.

[Manhattan2]

There is a way to get many times more green energy from the panels and solar collectors already constructed and the Solar Trasnfer solution is most profound when put into full deployment.
January 20th, 2009 will be the biggest news day this century and it will not just be all about Barack Obama. Solar Transfer and "The Manhattan 2 Project" will be putting on display, on a number of media channels the solution to energy independence and some powerful security and public health products. Included will be the Seeing Aid, and the Haptic glove technology that will be needed to view or touch the solutions. Just Google Solar Transfer or Seeing Aid to find our Jan 20th announcement.

[Manhattan2]

What happened to Wind and Solar? Barack Obama pushed for Wind and Solar in his speeches and run for the presidency. Now his pick throws Nuclear front and center. Is Barack Obama behind the change of direction? Play back the debates. See how many times Barack Obama says Wind and Solar, then see how many time he says he is in favor of nuclear. I think you will find some discrepancy between before and after election chatter. Is that something we should continue to be prepared for?

[ittesi259]

The article said nuclear and clean coal were part of the solution not the whole solution....and your crap about Solar Transfer means nothing until you can actually give me information about it that isn't a website that echoes your posts here. I wanna know what it is, how it works, why its better, how can I implement it at my residence and specifically how much it costs and when I can get it. If you can't answer those questions I don't want to hear anymore about Solar Transfer.

[mmichaels]

Gotcha! You didn't really think a politician would tell the truth did you? It's an old trick..say what you have to say to get elected. He's in now. He won't need to you again for another 3 1/2 years or so.

[i_am_still_wade]

Maybe Obama realized solar is insanely inefficient. Did you that production solar cells are at best 11% efficient? Lets assume for the sake of argument that solar cells were the ideal 100% efficient. In that scenario, a solar power plant the size of a nuclear reactor would generate less electricity than that nuclear reactor. Unless solar panels are placed everywhere, it is not enough even under ideal conditions.

One thing that must also be considered is that if stop using coal than we would have an economic disaster. People in Appalachia depend on coal to make their living. Just imagine if they suddenly lost their job. Clean coal is a good idea because it keeps them employed.

Besides, I remember well how Obama supported nuclear and coal pre-election. What you should be worried about with Obama is why he surrounds himself with socialists like his new climate czar.

[i_am_still_wade]

Maybe Obama realized solar is insanely inefficient. Did you that production solar cells are at best 11% efficient? Lets assume for the sake of argument that solar cells were the ideal 100% efficient. In that scenario, a solar power plant the size of a nuclear reactor would generate less electricity than that nuclear reactor. Unless solar panels are placed everywhere, it is not enough even under ideal conditions.

One thing that must also be considered is that if stop using coal than we would have an economic disaster. People in Appalachia depend on coal to make their living. Just imagine if they suddenly lost their job. Clean coal is a good idea because it keeps them employed.

Pop quiz: how many people have died in the US due to nuclear power? Answer: 0, none, nada, nil, zilch. Pop quiz: how much nuclear waste does a modern reactor produce per year? Answer: 3 cubic meters after the standard reprocessing. All the fears of nuclear power are based on ignorance and lies.

[Penguinisto]

@Wade: I agree about Manhattan2 being a nutcase, but...

The figure is for top-end solar-to-power energy is at 17% conversion efficiency, not 11%. You can get 30%+ in a lab, but manufacturing won't catch up to that for a very long time.

That said, anything not hydro or wind really isn't all that much better - It takes oil to transport oil to the end-user (burned on tankers, trains, and/or delivery trucks, burned to eventually power oil drills and pumps, burned to fuel the oil refineries, etc etc). Natural Gas requires steam reforming. Biofuels require fertilizer, transport, and a LOT of handling. Coal requires mining, transport, cleaning post-combustion, etc.

Nuclear has a solid chance of being the best at conversion, but there's a couple of problems. Nope, nothing to do with waste or radiation - those can be fixed. The problem is that we don't really have too awful much uranium to go around, and processing it is beastly in terms of the amount of power used to refine it to a useful percentage. Breeder reactors help ameliorate that, but only barely. There's also teh horrendous construction costs and regulatory obstacles (albeit necessary ones to prevent, say, another Chernobyl...)

Out of the whole wad, hydro and wind are the most efficient, followed by solar. - These take a bit of initial investment, but once in place, operate with little maintenance (in solar's case, pretty much none since there's usually no moving parts involved until you add things like optional tracker motors), and aside from availability of moving water, air, or sunlight (the big problem that each of these methods have), they are the most efficient means of gathering electricity in the long run.

All of this said, there is no one-size solution. There also is no superior solution... but a combination of them together can certainly make one hell of a dent in the fossil fuel aspect of things...

[rapier1]

Efficiency is sort of a bogus argument in the way you are using it. Its important to remember that the input energy source is free. Efficiency does matter in terms of the footage required for a desired output and in terms of material cost. However, if material and installation costs are brought down low enough then efficiency issues become less important overall.

[drpipe]

I'm glad to see nuclear mentioned; the lack of talk about nuclear power pre-election from Obama was one of the only things about him that had me worried - I was concerned that groundless anti-nuclear sentiment would hamper our use of this tech, which is the first and most obvious power source we should be looking to expand in our efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Yes, electric cars, yes, solar and wind, yes of course! But we have nuclear now!

[Commander_Spock]

Re: "Yes, electric cars, yes, solar and wind, yes of course! But we have nuclear now!".

Aren't the words - "Hydro-Electricity Generation" in your vocabulary!

[Manhattan2]

What worries me is construction delays, cost over runs and:
Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Kashiwazaki earthquake, and the radioactive waste.

[ittesi259]

People fail to recognize the safety that has gone into nuclear the new designs for reactors since those incidents. Of course I'm probably biased having grown up with a father who has 25 years as a maintenance employee at a nuclear plant, but he doesn't glow in the dark or have cancer, and he's around it day in and day out.

[rapier1]

Hydro electric has its own problems. Generally you have to dam river systems which cause significant environmental issues. Not every location is well suited for hyrdo either. Deep well thermal might be a better solution but its still on the fringes, its not all that cheap, and you still have the potential of other issues.

[Commander_Spock]

What has happened to Hydro-Electricity Generation resources. Well, they and their families can live as close as they wish to those nuclear facilities; mine will be advised to live as far away as possible from any Chernobyl-like facilities.

[Hernys]

Even if you count Chernobyl (which was a case of gross mismanagement) living a few Km away from a nuclear plant is safer than living the same distance away from a coal plant (and if you live the same distance away from an hydroelectric generator, you better know how to swim).
Nuclear is safe even with the old technology, with new technolgy it can be made a few orders of magnitude safer. But people fear what they don't understand, which is a reasonable reaction, but not a good one.

[shepsters]

There ain't no such animal as "clean coal" and oxymoron if there ever was one! Ah well, business as usual in the land of gobbledygook that is the good 'ol Government of the good 'ol US of A.

[Seaspray0]

You're right, it is an oxymoron. But the term was coined to represent burning coal without the massive amounts of emmissions found in a standard coal burning power plant. It would be like comparing a vehicle today which emmits a small fraction of the polutants as one made 30 years ago. Maybe they should have said "cleaner than before coal" but it just doesn't have the same ring to it.

[maxsell]

None of this matters if you can get the power to the people. We need to work on transmission lines. Nuclear and coal absolutely must be mentioned on any energy discussions. Wind and Solar are not there yet and they still still need transmission lines since most of the wind potential is in the plains and solar in the west. I don't know if you have ever been close to one of those wind turbines, They are massive; I don't want one near my house.

[ittesi259]

Yes, I work for a utility company and people say they want us to have renewables and we have a regulatory mandate to have 20 percent renewables by 2010.....the problem is the second you tell people you are gonna do it but need to build a transmission line you immediately get sued and made the bad guy over visual blight and blah blah blah. Um...you can't have one without the other people.....learn to accept that.

[BSinton]

Full marks maxsell,
The transmission system is a disaster waiting to happen.

There have been a couple of small scale events, that should have got some alarm bells ringing. However I fear it will need a good size disaster to get action. Too late as usual.

Note that transmission gets very little attention, it's all , lets have wind,wave,solar,coal as the generator .

[bata4689]

"Clean" coal is a MYTH. There is no such thing ANYWHERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ferretboy88]

i didn't like when he said he wanted gas prices to be at Euro levels. Even obama didn't like that. Come up with a new source then go nuts with the gas prices.

[bj1126]

At least he sounds realistic. Unlike Manhattan2 and the rest of the clowns expecting us to ONLY get any new electricity from solar or wind and are perfectly fine with economy crippling astronomic energy prices.

[spoonie1972]

What worries me is construction delays, cost over runs and:
Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Kashiwazaki earthquake, and the radioactive waste.

Nuclear plants have advanced quite a bit. Take a look at Canada's reactors - and they're OLD.

[ToddWBeaver]

If only he weren't so adamant about AGW.

[stockyjoe]

I still have issue with nuclear power plants. We all know the life of the waste it produces. I know Nuclear produces a lot of fuel efficiently and cheaply but in a way we are just opening the gates for yet another toxic waste problem.

[NewEnglandMOM]

Glad to see that there are more that comment on NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL... with all the water wasted collecting the coal, the black lung and the mining deaths it is not the right thing for my family- of yah and the CO2 when it is burned. Lets be honest "all the jobs" clean coal can make- we are in the technology age more and more machines are going to mine for coal- so what job will that create???