US wants nuclear key to emissions

[jpak]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22476968-5005200,00.html

THE Bush administration will stress this week the importance of nuclear power in the fight against global warming, saying it must be a part of any push for a clean energy future.

As climate change talks at the UN get under way in New York and with further meetings this week in Washington, President George W. Bush's chief environmental adviser, James Connaughton, said the administration was committed to reaching an agreement on a "long-term goal" of reducing emissions.

But he said any target for lower emissions would have to include nuclear power.

"We cannot achieve a significant emission reduction into the future unless we substantially increase the global utilisation of zero-emission nuclear power," Mr Connaughton said at a State Department briefing.

"You cannot get from here to there without a lot of nuclear power being added to the mix. We need more renewables, we need second generation bio-fuels, we need efficiency (targets); we need all of it and nuclear is an important piece of that."

<more>

[fenriswolf]

1. just spend the hundred of millions of dollars

that it takes to set up a nuclear reactor and spend it on electricity consumption, change our current to one that looses less in transmission, perfect super conductors or work more on cold fusion or find to cheaply (both finacially and environmentally) to seperate hydrogen from oxygen.

[TheWraith]

3. Okay, for starters, cold fusion doesn't work.

"change our current to one that looses less in transmission,"

Short of replacing our existing infrastructure with high-temperature superconductors, there's very little we can do to decrease line losses.

"or work more on cold fusion or find to cheaply (both finacially and environmentally) to seperate hydrogen from oxygen."

Cracking hydrogen and oxygen is never 100% efficient, so you always lose some of the energy you put into it, let alone trying to extract the energy back out of the gasses.

Unless we want to wait for a solution, fission reactors are one of only two things really on the horizon that offer a really greenhouse-sensitive method of mass electrical generation, the other one being Polywell type fusion reactors. But even once the funding is available for Bussard's testbed reactor, it's probably going to be 10 years before the design is sufficiently bug-tested for mass production, and I don't think we should be waiting.

[angrycarpenter]

2. still trying to open yucca mountain

Don't know how that is going right now but this sounds like a pressure tactic for the continuation of the project.

[NNadir]

4. In other news, George W. Bush reports that 2 + 7 = 9.

Greenpeace is predictably outraged.