Look it up. Even though Molten Salt has none of those issues, and even given the negative results of Chernobyl, Fukishima, and 3-Mile Island (which BTW I visited on a Physics Class trip while under construction the day JFK was assassinated) the negative impact of nuclear of those 3 was almost nil, especially compared to ANY alternative, and especially coal.

Few died in Chernobyl from any cause... 60 total during and including the decade after, roughly twice the number who died constructing the Brooklyn Bridge, though that reported number may be a low estimate considering the long term effects of "Caisson Disease".

Few died from anything nuclear at Fukishama... most drowned in the tsunmami or were crushed by falling debris from the earthquake. Nobody, not one person, was even made ill at 3 Mile Island. Even within the first mile of radius around 3 Mile radiation exposure was less than a third of a single chest Xray.

FYI "The China Syndrome" was utterly fake propaganda. It's Madagascar that's roughly opposite the US, not China, but "The Madagascar Syndrome" wouldn't have sold as well Nobody seemed to notice that an actual meltdown (which did not even occur in the movie, just the imagined threat) does not "burn through the Earth and out the other side". It is physically impossible for many reasons... literally laughably absurd.

The problem is, that's just not physically possible.

First, removing heat from the oceans would in itself require energy (see Hazel's post earlier in this thread). Second, where do you put that energy? Into the ground somehow? Or into the atmosphere, negating the heat sink effect the ocean is currently providing?

All energy we "use" just change state, and it all ends up as heat. Every last bit of it.

We have one source of energy we can safely use: The sun, and by extension wind and ocean waves. The earth absorbs a certain amount of the sun's rays on the side pointing towards it, and fortunately radiates a similar amount of energy on the opposite side. Well, except recently it's started absorbing more, which means we're slowly heating up. Which is probably very bad.

I believe the worst thing that could possibly happen to us, is if cheap fusion power were to become available. We'd probably cook ourselves within a few decades.Not too sure about Fukushima (I don't have all the facts), but the worst of those three is easily Chernobyl/Prypyat, and that particular incident should teach us a very important lesson: There's no system so safe and secure that human incompetence and idiocy can't turn it into a horrible disaster.

The Chernobyl reactor was incredibly well-made, and even ran on low-grade fuel. Unlike the Three Mile Island reactor (on/off indicator wired to a switch rather than a valve sensor) or Fukushima (backup systems in a basement that would easily be flooded by a tsunami), the failure didn't occur because of moronic design mistakes, but because all procedures and security precautions were ignored for political reasons.

And that's precisely how humans in power tend to behave, so we should expect that to happen again. And again. And again.Absolutely. After all, there's such a thing as gravity. The whole "China syndrome" idea is unbelievably stupid, and does not in any way reflect the real security issues with nuclear reactors.

Ser Olmy please look up Thorium Molten Salt Reactor or try this.... there are many more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak

Better still look up the actual operation design of Molten Salt Reactors. They don't need to be monitored! If controls power gives out, the sealed molten salts simply solidify back to a solid where no reaction takes place. Once again - they can't explode. They can't meltdown. They can't release radiation into the ground or the atmosphere and they don't need water.

Chernobyl was still of the design meant for submarines that required constant monitoring by humans and machines to keep the process from overheating and running away. Molten Salt does not work that way. It can't run away. Please do check around. There are obstacles but from what I see they do not include serious safety issues.

BTW you do recognize how much safer cars are today than even just a few decades ago, right? How often do you worry about being electrocuted in your home? At one time it was a major problem and a common cause of damage and death. Progress happens.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enviro...red_generation for a brief comparison.

Having said that, I still feel uncomfortable with the thought of relying on fission power in the long term; the biggest problems are associated with people's mismanagement rather than the actual hardware - shortcuts will eventually make the safest of sytems unsafe.

There is a chance. Because laws of energy conservation are only approximately true. In real world portion of energy always disperse. I think that solution is just restore life in oceans. To rebuild huge biomass of living in oceans creatures. All energy transformation and energy consumption processes should be enough to cool down oceans. And rescue ice. So we need total prohibition of fish fishing - in general no industry level harvesting of oceans, seas. And of course life restoration. Approximately 20-30 years should be enough for this if we will start today. Because still ocean resources are enough.

I don't like the idea of relying on fission for another reason. Even if the reactors are safe, they still generate long lasting radioactive waste, which we will be essentially handing on to our children as a problem for them to solve. How is that ethically acceptable? I don't see how it is any different from handing them an atmosphere full of carbon dioxide. Either way, they will be paying the bill for our lifestyle.

Hello hazel
You are of course correct that waste products are a serious issue but as you also noted such waste is from all means of generating power. The byproducts of fossil fuels often never degrade with time and are far more difficult to just collect and store. One of my brothers-in-law works for a company selling "scrubbers" and they do accomplish some good but they also have their own problems.

Thorium Salt Reactors have one advantage in that they can burn up existing fuel rods whose half life is many human lifetimes and the resulting next level waste lasts orders of magnitude less time and has substantially less mass - easier and safer to store. Another advantage of course is they don't need continual flowing water. There are a few more advantages.

Bottom line - given the track record of France's nuclear program with older, less safe, more polluting reactors that STILL compare extremely favorably with fossil fuels (major net gain actually) I think we should at the very least have a few dozen Molten Salt Reactors in actual use to become intimately familiar with what modifications/adaptions will be even more beneficial.

The US was one of the first countries to explore nuclear power generation and the first to incite severe backlash. The Sierra Club, a potent political force with a largely beneficial environmental agenda, at first championed nuclear power. The story of how one person gathered support and altered that agenda by equating nuclear power with nuclear bombs for an extremely potent negative emotional reaction is actually quite fascinating.

It's very hard if not impossible to measure the huge and global impact of the movie "The China Syndrome" but he, Jerry Brown, Jane Fonda and others most definitely accomplished their aims. The advertising poster for the movie has a background of a nuclear mushroom cloud! They completely lied about (or simply had no clue) about the danger of Meltdown. The Sierra Club did a 180 and came out strongly against nuclear and backed the "No Nukes" movement. At best they had their priorities misguided. They should have come out against nuclear weapons and fossil fuels. Those are seriously threatening. If we are forced into a condition of "Crisis Management", itself not a good policy, the whole premise is to put out the fires already tall enough to burn one's ass. These so-called but misinformed environmentalists were actually "on fire" while they squirted water on tiny embers.

It's like stepping on a fiver to pick up a penny.

BTW isn't it amazing and a bit insane that we as a species still to this day accept that a single mistake with atomic weapons, say between Pakistan and India, even if it never escalated beyond a first exchange, would have global effects, murdering many hundreds of millions? Yes, nuclear bombs are clear and present danger in the extreme, but that does not conflate to all nuclear processes.

Fear is a potent motivator but to actually deal with what we fear we must move past fear into management mode and that requires verifiable information which usually means education. I urge all to educate themselves on these issues. It's rather important.

@ Ser Olmy
But this was one of the points I was trying to make! Apart from Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) or perhaps some form of heat pump device, is there no way to convert the heat energy into electrical energy?

If you want to go nuclear for energy, I'd go got the Thorium molten salt reactors but they seem to be in the same stages of development as OTEC power; still in their infancy. Regarding the waste products?
From Wikipedia: Seems a lot better bet than current reactors though fusion seems to be more in the headlines now. I'd find them more worrying, you need shed loads of energy to generate the magnetic fields to contain the plasma before you get any payback.

I found Michael Shellenberger's TED talk in enorbet's post #33 very interesting, renewables, which are getting huge investments to "Save the Planet," generate only a small amount of the power needed plus use rare earths and toxic heavy metals in their construction. No real plans for recycling yet as far as I can tell.

Play Bonny!

The reason we can say there's "usable energy" stored as heat in the oceans, is that there's less heat somewhere else.

We can indeed siphon off some of that differential by letting the heat power something as it flows from one place to another, say, with something as simple as a Stirling engine. The result: The temperature difference between the oceans and whatever we choose as the recipient of that energy, lessens over time. And the energy we collect will be used to power various devices, which eventually converts it all to heat.

As long as we utilise energy from solar or wind or waves, that's not an issue. That's heat we'd be receiving from the sun anyway. Even burning wood is basically using stored solar energy. But use anything else, and we're adding heat to the equation, heat that would otherwise not be there. The question is just how much, and what effect it will have over time.

I'm not sure where you're going with this. I think you'll find the sun is the thing which is heating the oceans. Being able to convert this energy to electrical energy would be useful (especially with the growing demand for electric vehicles and air conditioners!) with the cooling of the oceans a bonus. However, I don't see any solution to this at present which would scale to anything viable.

Play Bonny!

No, you can only convert heat flow (i.e., move it from a hotter to a colder volume) into electric energy.

Yes, and the temperature difference needs to be large to extract energy efficiently. The ocean is the cold side for some power plants.

Since electricity is all the same, for better or for worse, the cheapest method of extracting energy wins. Having to compete on cost eliminates a lot of potential sources of energy.

Note that some sources of energy are "cheating" by externalizing their costs, or by pushing cost into the future.
Ed

Ah... I seem to have my terminology mixed up, perhaps I should have said: I agree that heat flows from hot to cold in general. However, the surface of the oceans are much hotter than the depths. Water isn't that good a conductor of heat. (I remember doing an experiment in a physics class waaaay back in the 1960s where we sunk an ice cube to the bottom of a test tube and boiled the water at the top with a bunsen flame.) This temperature differential is what OTEC uses to generate electricity with quite a few useful by-products.
Play Bonny!

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Yes, of course there is. You use a steam-powered dynamo. It's how most power stations work at the moment. The steam is produced either by burning carbon fuels or by cooling a nuclear pile. And it's very inefficient.

Or you can use an internal combustion engine, which is even more inefficient.