Silhouette
Gold Member
- Jul 15, 2013
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Well you folks in Alaska have figured out how to use your geothermal resources for refrigerant boilers and heat exchangers to run turbines, instead of boiling water with radiation.
Japan has no excuse at all. They are sitting atop a string of active volcanoes. There are geothermal vents everywhere in Japan. Boiling water or the heat to do so is everywhere there. All nuclear power plants do is use an extremely dangerous heat source ..all just to boil water to run turbines, just like coal power plants, and oil power plants and solar thermal steam power plants do. There is no technology different with nuclear plants other than the extreme and costly dangers of mining uranium, transporting it, refining it, burning it and containing that, waste mitigation for 200,000 years and so on.
Why do they use it? Because it's very tricky to do and nearly impossible to get permits for unless you're an elite company with clout like GE. Power producers like to have a monopoly on their product. If everyone figured out to use other types of steam to run turbines, from the ground or parabolic-focused sunlight onto nearby linear oil-filled tubing to heat exchangers, then there'd be more competition.
They've done studies on the cost-effectiveness of nuclear power. And the republicans who whine about subsidizing solar startups (all the vastly different types like photovoltaics, simple thermal collectors for water heating, or parabolic linear solar thermal generators), should take note that with all the subsidies and unspoken unfathomable cost of nuclear, that there has never been a legitimate profit from nuclear energy. Essentially, those invested in and who run nuclear plants are corporate welfare recipients and you and I dear taxpayers are paying for them to destroy our world and still take home money for themselves. All so they can just use steam to run turbines. Steam power...like they used back in the 1800s.
