Nuclear power plants produce heat. That’s how they work. If we left the uranium in the ground, that heat would remain unrealized as matter. We are in fact releasing heat during the reaction process that otherwise would not be on the planet.

How much heat? Gobs of it.

But lets talk about all types of power generation, coal, gas and nuclear. Power plants heat water to produce super heated steam to turn turbines (terribly inefficient), to generate electricity. The heated water must then be cooled. It’s too hot to release into nature, but too cold to turn the turbines again. That would be what the author calls “Waste Heat”.

This heat is dissipated (slowly, so as not to boil anything it touches) into the environment using, believe it or not, fresh water. Turns out more than half of the fresh water consumed in the US is used to cool power plants. MORE THAN HALF of the ~345,000 Mgal/day we use. Here’s a link to a graph from Lawrence Livermore Labs documenting the fact: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/water/water_flow_archive/US_water2000.pdf.

No matter what you say, that’s a lot of heat.

If we weren’t burning these fossil fuels and generating heat through nuclear reaction, this heat would not be released into the atmosphere. It would remain trapped in the coal, gas and uranium lying around in the ground.

Once released, however, greenhouse gasses trap this abundance of heat against the earth which contributes to global warming.

All power plants contribute to global warming, even nuclear.

The earth receives 1,370 Watts per square meter of energy from the sun 24 hours a day. Some is reflected back into space immediately, and some penetrates the atmosphere to warm the surface of the earth. The earth is constantly absorbing and radiating this energy back into space. In the daytime it absorbs faster than it radiates and the earth heats up, while at night it radiates faster than it absorbs and the earth cools down. On the average over all latitudes this absorption and radiation are in equilibrium and produce an average global temperature.

The earth receives 110,000 times as much energy every second from the sun as is released by all forms of primary human energy production–fossil fuels, biofuels, hydroelectric power, geothermal and nuclear. Applying the correct law to this, the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, shows that the maximum increase of temperature caused by all anthropogenic sources is less than 0.006 degrees Celsius. Measured global warming is closer to 1 degree Celsius–more than 160 times what can be accounted for by human activity. The contribution of the heat from nuclear reactors is no different from any other form of heat released by human activity. On a global basis it is no more than 14% of the total. By itself, the heat released by all the nuclear reactors in operation in the world cause less than one tenth of one percent of the observed global warming.

Global warming requires greenhouse gases to impede the ability of the earth to shed the heat it absorbs from the sun. Energy from the sun arrives in visible wavelengths of light to which the atmosphere is transparent, but it is radiated back into space in the longer wavelength infrared radiation, and the greenhouse gases make the atmosphere more opaque to that light. Thus the atmosphere absorbs the escaping energy and heats up until it is warm enough to radiate it away and restore thermodynamic equilibrium.

Scientists agree that the earth has slightly warmed over the past century. That is a measured observed fact. What is controversial is whether it is caused by human activity or by natural cycles. No competent climatologist believes it is caused by the direct heat released by human activity–nuclear or otherwise.

1 marble of this fuel in your hand could power your entire life.

500 tons of this fuel could power %100 of America’s energy needs for 1 year.

This fuel is an Element called Thorium.

http://energyfromthorium.com/plan/

The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

the Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR, pronounced “lifter”) uses uranium and thorium dissolved in fluoride salts. These salts are chemically stable, impervious to radiation damage, and non-corrosive to the vessels that contain them. LFTR cores can be made much smaller than a typical light water reactor (LWR).

The Advantages

1)Safety–LFTRs Cannot Melt down like Uranium Reactors.

2)Proliferation Resistance–Thorium Fuel Cycle cannot make weapons grade materials.

3)Energy Production–LFTR is 300 times more efficient than a typical uranium LWR.

4) Waste–A LFTR power plant would generate 4,000 times less mining waste and 10,000 times less nuclear waste than an LWR.

5:) Secondary Products–Because an LFTR is so energy dense, the nuclear “waste” products from the LFTR include stable rhodium and ruthenium, rare elements needed in modern electronics

If you wanted to stay warm, and i handed you a space blanket, would you wrap yourself in it, or set it on fire? which would keep you warm longer?

The already robust arguments against nuclear power (at least the business-as-usual kind) are sufficient.

Adding anthropocentric global warming via carbon infusion denial to the mix simply kills it.

Also, all waste heat should be utilized at least once, if possible. That’s done in a lot of countries and a lot of locations already.

If you can’t use the waste heat from a coal plant, then that’s an area where you should already ban building coal plants.

Nukes are too dangerous to use the waste heat directly and efficiently, but that’s not to say their waste heat can’t be exploited, just a little less efficiently – right now price incentives work against that.

I should note that Nathan Myrhvold makes the same mistake, and it got parroted by the Freakonomics science illiterates.

Frankly, in general, MDs shouldn’t inveigh on physical science, physics, or circulation issues.

We have an ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY –

scarcity and rumors of scarcity are good for the bottom line and thus, an integral, and REQUIRED part of the capitalist way.

Time to drop it and assist energy costs to drop towards zero!

As to storing/releasing solar/wind – there is a dazzling array of techniques- molten salt, 10 kinds of batteries, heat pumps, flywheels, etc. Good for baseload.

Looks like a no-brainer, does it not?

It’s actually a brain-teaser!

The explanation will be presented ~Aug. 12-13.

It’s a common mistake, not unlike how you spelled my name.

But until now, conventional wisdom has been that big ocean impacts might not be seen until the second half of the century. This new research in Nature suggests we may have much less time to act than we thought if we want to save marine life — and ourselves. The study concludes:

In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs (phytoplankton) account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth. Analyses of satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration (available since 1979) have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends. Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.