Oh purlease. What 'global warming'?
That stopped 20 years ago before they started 'adjusting' historical records to bring it back.
The winter I am looking out at with frost on the ground is as bleak as it was 50 years ago.
High levels of population are a proble'm but not because of lack of abundant cheap energy, or because of 'global warming
Water is a far more urgent problem.
Well its definitely in te renewable lobbies interst to pay for a study like that.
It is of course nonsense. You need far more concretre per lifetime MWh generated in a windmill than a nuke
Anyone that stupid cannot build a bomb. They cant even build a bomb properly out of fertiliser which the IRA were much better at. If - say - Iran were to manange to deliver a nuke into Israel and set it off, can you imagine what would happen to Iran?
No, all of the solutions that work perfectly well have been opposed by greens.
The simplest and most obvious and cheapest solution would be to take it all out to the Marianas and throw it overboard in concrete cans. To join the 4 BILLION tonnes of uranium in et seas already
uber low level waste is merely landfilled in steel cases that will do te
100 years plus needed.uber high level is tomorrows nuclear fuel anyway.
Intermediate - the sort of thousand year slightly radioactive and biological active s*it - ceasium and the like - simply needs putting out of reach for 1000 years. How old are the pyramids? Stonehenge? I maen really galssifying it and stuffing it at the bottom of a disused coal mine in a sealed box is fine.
If you want to REALLY scare yourself go and take a geiger counter to some disused radium/uranium mine in cornwall or dartmoor and exmoor.
hundreds of times worse than a block of internediate waste.
Well ships of course will be nuclear powered - the weight of the shielding is not an issue - but ammonia is an interesting one. It would certainly be a way to replace natural gas to make fertiliser anyway, which is one of the big non-energy uses of it.
Hydrogen my well be useful as a reducing agent for smelting metals,
But its hard to see anything to beat long chain hydrocarbons for portable energy use, and its possible that dirt cheap nuclear poweer would allow reasonable yiled in stynethsis to make it viwable ..
The volume gets you with hydrogen, plus safety and containment.
"The energy density of ammonia is 22.5 MJ/kg at HHV, which is about half of that for typical hydrocarbon fuels but higher than metal hydrides (Zamfirescu and Dincer, 2008; Züttel et al., 2010). The raw energy density of liquid ammonia is 11.5 MJ/L, which is higher than the 8.491 MJ/L for liquid hydrogen and the 4.5 MJ/L for compressed H2 at 690 bar and 15°C1 . Ammonia is a good energy vector for on-board hydrogen storage (Green, 1982; Klerke et al., 2008; Lan et al., 2012). However, safety is regarded as the major drawback of using ammonia as the fuel. Ammonia is toxic but it is detectable by humans in concentrations of just 1 ppm (Reich et al., 2001). Anhydrous ammonia is lighter than air then tends to disperse in the atmosphere. NH3 would be as safe as the use of gasoline as a transportation fuel (Olson and Holbrook, 2007). The ammonia released from an ammonia tank during a car accident may cause potential safety problem but this can be solved through the application of metal amines with low ammonia partial pressure (Klerke et al., 2008).
Compared to hydrogen, ammonia is easier to be transported. It is much more energy efficient and much lower cost to produce, store, and deliver hydrogen as NH3 than as compressed and/or cryogenic hydrogen (Figure 1) (Olson and Holbrook, 2007). The infrastructure for ammonia already exists while for hydrogen, new fueling stations have to be built, which is a big investment (Lan et al., 2012)."
You really want to reduce CO2 and water and make synthetic hydrocarbon. Trouble is there is bugger all CO2 in the atmosphere.
So whereas it might be OK in a fuel cell in a car to go with ammonia, it isnt really going to make a nice pollution free plane ride.
But what may in fact be the answer is bloody damned fast nuclear ships
The larger the ship the less drag at a given speed per unit weight, and ships - containers and tankers - are conventionally operated to find a local minimum to the cost equation. Too fast and you burn more fuel per tonne mile, too slow and your cost of capital per tonne mile increases.
If your fuel cost is peanuts but your cost of capital is high, and that's the case for a nukey ship, your accountant will tell you to push it to the maximum speed it can handle, and your engineers will start talking about lifting it out of the water on hydrofoils, or building an ekranoplane as well.
If one wants to say, do southampton to new york in a day, before taking a high speed electric train, that's probably 120-150mph Well within ekranoplane range, but not sure about hydrofoils. its above the world record for a hovercraft, but not by much.
A displacement nuclear ship should do it in 2-3 days nuclear subs have broken 50mph as well
Anyway,. my point is that climate change and renewable energy are all red herrings, there is no shortage of nuclear fuel and all the problems in using it for land and sea based installations are eminently soluble. What there is is a r9ising shortage of affordable fossil fuels.
All the problems with nuclear arise with portable power off grid. And basic chemical feedstocks. I think the feedstock chemistry is soluble, but portable off grid power is a real bugger.
You really want carbon based fuels, but without fossil sources, carbon is in very short supply, and the only means of getting it out of the air is really using biofuel of some sort - algae and the like. Possible nuclear illuminated photosynthesis tanks to remove it from the air might work, but we are already right on the lower limits of CO2 in the air which allows plants to work efficiently - we really would need CO2 up around 800ppm to get that to be efficient.