On an American tv station I saw an ad promoting coal energy (the current strongest alternative to nuclear). The claim was that there are three times more coal plants now than in 1970 and pollutants from coal energy production had been reduced by a third. So what they flat-out told you was that pollution from coal energy (chief cause of respiratory illness) has doubled.
I’ve heard better spin.
I could pause to wonder how this has been overlooked in the press for the past thirty years, but we still drive fossil-fuel burning cars so you can hardly knock the press for ignoring what the general public obviously doesn’t care about.
The best plan for disposal of nuclear waste (the primary objection to Nuke Power of intelligent minds everywhere) is launching the stuff into space, into the sun, even. The big obstacle for this is the cost of lifting extremely heavy radioactive waste into orbit. The cost far outweighs the benefit, financially speaking.
One day in the not too distant future this may be solved, you may have heard, with a space elevator. No word of a lie, the science is sound, we may reach orbit for effectively free with the ol’ snake charmer climbing the rope trick. A cable, anchored to the ground at one end and to nothing at all in space, actually works. Freefall keeps it aloft. And this crazy magical thing may not be far off.
So… coal… yeah… maybe they figure it’s been long enough since pandemic black-lung?
There is another problem with shooting the stuff into space: What if it explodes? You’re contaminating a huge area, same is true for the space elevator.
More interesting is to try and see if cold fusion is feasible, there are some indications that this may actually solve our problems.
Hot fusion (e.g. Sun on Earth) is probably at least 50 years away from even being remotely useful, so far all the energy that is generated by it is not enough to sustain the hot plasma, cold fusion (if it works) does not have these kinds of restrains.
But hey, don’t forget the advertising campaign that proudly exclaims: “Carbon is Life” so all the Coal plants are actually GIVING life!
It’s said that coal has killed more people than nuclear accidents. A rational society would look at coal belching from smoke stacks, tote up the cost of coal mining, radiation deaths from alll that carbon in the air and might conclude that nuclear power represents a cleaner way to get energy.
Liftport is not adverse to being paid to ship this stuff up. There are some problems.
Simply getting it up to the top of the elevator is not enough – you have to have a carrier to haul the stuff off. Make many of these and the cost drops – enough to make it cost-effective?
The stuff has to be hauled from the plant to the bottom of the elevator – that’s going to be on the equator, likely 400 miles west of South America. This increases the cost of shipping it. Yes the cost goes down the more you ship but is there enough to lower the cost?
Lawsuits from concerned parties, afraid of what happens when an accident occurs. While annoying and we might dismiss these guys out of hand you can’t – lawsuits cost all parties concerned. Note that in some cases this is the point o a lawsuit – not to win but to hogtie the company and divert assets from operations to defense. This can kill small companies.
Our business process is (or will be) built around being the hauler. We leave development of resources and what to haul to the customer.
So if a business case can be made for hauling the stuff out, we’ll partner with the company. But good luck with that – the economics of it might not favor such an operation.
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