Power-full questions

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

Two questions for the energy production crowd:

1.) How long do nuclear fuel rods last? This is kind of a vague question I know, but what I'm getting at is this: more and more people are boosting nuclear energy as an energy solution. Fine. But Uranium isn't exactly the most common element in the world. If we switched over to a heavy nuclear base, then we're going to start gobbling up uranium and it's just as susceptible to running out as oil is (if not more so). My impression, is that nuclear fuel lasts for a good long while before it's too depleted to be useful, but I'm hazy on it. So what's a good estimate for how long a fuel rod will last in a modern plant? If you have data on how long nuclear fuel will last in more exotic new-fangled reactor types (like pebble-bed) feel free to chime in, but I'm mostly interested in how it works now.

2.) In all this talk about alternative energy, I've always thought that geothermal has gotten short shrift. The planet is hot and it's going to stay that way for awhile and it seems more reliable than wind or solar. It seems like an easy no-brainer to push hard on geothermal. So I'm curious as to what the hold up is. Is it mostly politics? Is it just really hard figuring out how to drill deeply enough to set one up? Are there other reasons?

later
Tom

Comments

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

This idea has been tossed around up in the Maritime Provinces for years - the Bay of Fundy has colossal tides, some of the biggest in the world, and it's occurred to more than one person over the years that you could get some serious work out of that if you built the right equipment. There's one generating station up there now, but as you might expect, the environmental lobby protests it regularly because it's a dam and Dams Are Bad. (Someone's working on another system that just sort of sits in the water and uses the flow as the tide goes in and out, but there are questions about whether that'll ever be efficient enough to bother with. Be pretty cool if it worked, but I'm sure the greens will find something about it to picket if it does. The turbines could suck in a fish or something.)