Map of electricity generation mix in United States
 

The Washington Post publishes this somewhat useful but very pretty map today:

Mapping how the United States generates its electricity - Washington Post

For us, at least, it updates some figures on the energy mix in different areas of the country. Plug in an electric in California and you are likely powering it largely with Natural Gas. Move to Maryland with the same car and it the energy going into your car might make it effectively a coal powered car. [EDIT: In Ky or WV you would really likely be driving an almost 100% coal powered Tesla. Yikes.]

I suppose solar generation development in the future could displace a lot of these more polluting sources.

At the Orange County auto show here in Cali this weekend I heard on the radio that there is a concept car, from maybe Mitsubishi, that is a PHEV that uses hydrogen fuel cells. That would be kinda cool.

Coal and wind power here.

By comparison texas generates more than enough wind power to power the entire state of New Mexico.

From the article:
"There are 99 reactors at 63 nuclear electric plants in the U.S. They have generated 20 percent of the nation’s electricity this year."

Seems like we should look into this one a little more.

Vermont:

Hydro: 493GWh
Wind: 159GWh
Solar: 28GWh
Natural Gas: 1GWh

Are there any other states with 99.8% clean energy?

EDIT: The US Energy Information Administration disagrees with these numbers:

Yes. The numbers seem possibly to be tracking different things. The WaPo story seems to track generation within a state, and link you posted tracks consumption which can come from out of state, of course. I think that's prt of the difference (only time for a quick read).

Nuclear is the way to go.

Corrected it for you...:rolleyes:

This is the attitude that causes coal fired power plants to continue to be built.

They can build a nuke in my backyard if they want. I'll gladly collect the monthly lease from them too.

Concerns about safety are unfounded. If people were really concerned about safety, they would do something about their weight problem so that they don't fall victim to the #1 most dangerous thing; heart disease.

I recently ran across an article on nuclear reactors that suggested thorium reactors rather than uranium reactors. No melt downs and other advantages that I do not remember.

I worked for 11 years in the Navy's nuclear power program. They have a long spotless record of nuclear power using 1/2 drunk or hungover, underpaid, 21 year old social misfits. Just put them out in the desert in geological stable areas away from major population centers by 10 miles or so. Also store all waste that can't be recycled on site. It's not rocket science (which has killed way more people).

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Google - Galen Windsor...

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Sorry, no. Nuclear waste continues to build up and be hazardous to life for millenia to come. Direct solar in the form of wind, biomass, hydro, PV, concentration and tidal is the way to go if one is concerned with sustainability.

Interesting, but a little misleading because it shows where the generation is, not the consumption. So a lot of the hydro produced in the Pacific Northwest gets shipped to places like Southern California (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie ), and very little of the hydro generation in the Sierra Nevada gets used there.

Really take reneck's advice above and https://youtu.be/x42qi7Fz1L0

Most waste, the most dangerous as well, can be recycled and reused. The rest is mostly "potentially contaminated" that is difficult to clear (even though it isn't measurable) or it has very low levels of radiation. Smoke detectors or Coleman lantern mantels give off more radiation then some of this stuff.
I once was doing normal search for uncontrolled radioactive material we periodically did and was able to detect a shipyard worker 40 feet away through a steel wall who had been given a barium xray the day before. Crazy levels, more then anything our reactor exposed us to as a common medical procedure.
This lady is a trip, and has a ton of videos. Here is one about eating apples from Chernobyl and comparing it to mushrooms from Germany. https://youtu.be/j6mreZ98_Ug

Hydro-electric, wind and solar are definitely the safest ways to make energy. Well, maybe not if you care about birds - solar-thermal and wind plants kill tons of birds. And hydroelectric plants probably have some impact on the migration and lifecycles of fish. Really, energy can't be reasonable concentrated and made usable by humans without some impact on the earth.

As others have said though, nuclear plants are far safer even than coal and oil plants, which have killed many more people and animals, even when you compare per unit of energy produced. You'd be surprised at the amount of heavy metals that end up in the soil and water table surrounding a #2 or coal power plants, nevermind what's in the air itself.

The radioactive material was mined from the earth, so it was already in our environment.

Using it up in a reactor is actually reducing the total amount of radioactive material on this planet. The "waste" can mostly be recycled.

Beyond that, the solution to pollution is dilution.

Not quite true, unfortunately. While there are a lot of radioactive materials in the environment (everything, basically), most aren't very radioactive. But if you take say uranium, with half-lives of 704 million (U-235) and 4.47 billion (U-238) years, and whack it with a bunch of neutrons so that it breaks apart into chunks (nuclear fission), some of those chunks are pretty radioactive.

The real problem isn't the radioactivity, which is easily managed. It's the hysterical reaction among a fraction of the public that greatly exaggerates the danger. Same thing as those anti-vaccine nut cases, who thought a small chance (now proven to be zero, as the initial reports were faked) of becoming autistic was somehow worse than death from disease.

There was a post a while ago comparing deaths by different energy sources. I found this:
https://scontent.fphx1-1.fna.fbcdn.n...04&oe=56B84EB1
Forbes Welcome

It's also "interesting" to see all the reports showing that the so-called "Dead Zone" around Chernobyl actually hosts a thriving ecosystem. Seems like that deadly radioactive nuclear waste is less harmful to wildlife than humans :-(

It is quite true. The radioactive material used in power plants is mined from the earth. In other words, it's already in nature, we just concentrated it to make it useful for power generation.

Again, the solution to pollution is dilution; just like nature has already done.

The hazardous life lasting thousands of years only happens when the fuel is used once, 5% to 16% of the fissile fuel is consumed and it is thrown away.
When the fuel is recycled and the waste isotopes are concentrated they lose 99.9% of their radioactivity after 40 years.

The raw waste is very unstable and requires continued cooling water. As a bonus the longer it sits around the more unstable it becomes. The sooner the waste and useable fissile fuel are separated the better it is for everyone.
The concentrated waste is actually more stable than the raw waste that is still loaded with uranium and plutonium.

The waste being left to be hazardous for thousands is the product of ignorant, reckless, careless, irresponsible, politically motivated people running our nuclear program. The only reason it is this way is because people chose to leave it this way.

Uranium/Plutonium fuel cycle will last up to 300 to 500 years, Thorium at least 1000 years. Sustainability is not an issue. Wind, solar, hydro, coal will hopefully all be obsolete by then.
The funky rare earth elements used to make solar panels and high strength rare earth magnets will be long gone or become very hard to find long before the thorium runs out.

Again on the subject of the horrible nuclear waste that everyone seems to be afraid of and/or not understand:
The weird thing with Thorium's main long lived "waste" isotope plutonium 248, is actually not really "waste". It is in demand for deep space exploration. Turns out its a pretty good nuclear fuel.

Not just mostly. Depending on the type of reactor it came from and how fresh the waste is, up to 95% of the "waste" can be recycled into fuel. This "recycled" fuel is loaded with plutonium and is better than new fuel.

Search for how many people have been killed by hydro power dam failures.
One dam break killed something like 20,000 or 30,000 people.
I believe total estimates are as high as 250,000 to 300,000 people.
Hydro power is one of the more deadly methods of power production.

How many people have been killed by nuclear power plants?
Directly, up to 130, indirectly maybe up to 5,000 (pure speculation).

My 2 bits .. not that it matters of course .. opinions are like __ .. everyone has one... :rolleyes:

Fusion > Fission

We already have a Fusion Reactor built , installed, and operating , with a vast surplus output for several billion years more fuel than the sum of all possible fissionable fuels on the planet.

Fission at best is an intermediate / middle step available today ... It's a known dead end road.

I see diverting resources away from the better long term solutions .. Fusion .. and Fusion Harnessing (RE) .. to instead invest those resources in a known dead end road .. to be .. short sighted .. and ultimately less efficient use of net-resources.

'dead zone' is misleading .. it's an area of vastly increased risk of many disorders .. cancers , birth defects .. etc.

The question is which is the larger contributor to the 'thriving' ... reducing our other human negative presence there we had previously been making .. or the negative of the health effects of the mess we made before we left ??

-0 + 6 = 6
-2 + 10 = 8

The -2 is still a negative.
net 8 > net 6 even with the -2 included.

No, that's not the way it works. If you didn't pay attention in high school physics, and haven't figured out how to use Google, Wikipedia, and other web resources (or your local public library), it goes something like this:

The U-235 used in power plants is actually not all that radioactive, with a half-life around 700 million years. In nature, it goes through a chain of alpha & beta decays, eventually winding up as lead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_...ctinium_series

However, it also has the property that if you hit it with a slow neutron, it breaks apart into (usually) two chunks plus some extra neutrons &c, releasing a bunch of energy. The chunks can be (and usually are) much more radioactive than the original U-235.

No, it's an area where this is claimed to be the case, based on little or no actual evidence.

I don't understand.

I claim 'dead zone' is misleading .. and you disagree.

Yet the rest of your post seems to agree with me that 'dead zone' is misleading.

Which is it?
Misleading or not?

Precisely, which speeds up the half-life of naturally occurring U235, which speeds up the amount of time that the radioactive substance is radioactive. The stuff is going to decay naturally, why not exploit the energy released instead of leaving it in the environment?

I agree that "dead zone" is misleading - that's where I came in. What I disagree on is the claim that it's an area of vastly increased risk of cancers, birth defects, &c. AFAIK, that claim is simply not supported by evidence.

No, it doesn't. The normal decay chain has a half-life, which is a series of alpha & beta decays taking place over hundreds of millions of years. Fission is an entirely different process, which basically doesn't happen in nature. (At least these days: see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natura...ission_reactor for an example in the distant past.)

Fission doesn't have a half-life: it happens when you hit the U-235 nucleus with the right sort of neutrons. The fission products are far more radioactive than the U-235. That's just a fact.

Your uraniums are barely radioactive, plutonium is slightly radioactive, but are nothing compared to their fission byproducts.
But because these byproducts are furiously radioactive, they don't stay that way for very long.

Thanks for clarification .. That makes more sense.

As it is off topic for this thread .. I created another thread for it , if you wish to discuss that topic in more depth.

Link

Chernobyl is the anti-nukes best argument at the same time not a good one. Worst case scenario on a old design from a country known for cutting every corner is an example how not to do something, not a reason to never try to do it.

The problem here is somehow big environmental lobbies bought into big oil's propaganda. So they will get to sell oil until ever drop is gone thanks to environmentalists blocking the only truly feasible replacement for electricity generation on a large scale.

Make no mistake we will end up a nuclear powered world sooner or later. Should we do it now or wait until we have burned every drop of fossil fuel on the planet?

Your quote missed the most interesting thing about this whole article, on the next line:

This is a big deal. We haven't built new plants in decades.


Also related:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-co...015/15-067.pdf

Watts Bar #2 was mostly built in the 80's but not approved to produce and has been in stasis ever since. It was just approved to start producing and is the first new nuke plant in 19 years to be allowed to begin producing power.

I think we need to be moving towards Thorium plants, but adding a few "normal" nuclear plants is a good thing in my book.

Not sure how you get 99.8% green or even what you consider green...

But Washington produces about 75% from hydro, plus about 18% from Wind, natural gas, and nuclear combined.

I don't really see that as our state being more environmentally conscious than other states. It's more that we won the location-lottery and have access to a lot of hydro power.

Oak Ridge 1969 MSRE nuclear reactor movie.
I am astonished at how far this was developed and then went no where.
It is a travesty that this video only has 68k views.

https://youtu.be/tyDbq5HRs0o