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....Uhm....as long as my economy gets fixed, that's not my number one concern. >>;

The 5th horseman of chaos, Change. (the other four are misinformation, committees, ambiguous instructions and stupidity)

The problem with the power industry being messed up is that most businesses require electricity. So they all carry the overhead cost of any buerocratic tampering with power generation, meaning that there is a lower percentage of profit after materials, which in turn means less to operate the company on, which means fewer jobs or lower pay, which leads to lower spending which leads to a decrease in demand for goods which leads to lowered prices which leads to lower amounts of money coming into the companies to pay their workers which leads to lower spending which leads to lower corporate income and so on, until you get almost to starvation or a good strong program to turn things around. Putting lots of people to work on something, even if it is just, for example, using labor intensive, low skill methods of tearing down abandoned buildings in Detroit or converting them to a more useful state.

But you can't get anything like enough power out of the proposed infrastructure. It isn't Possible. Short of a revolution in battery technology on the scale of the differance in power between nuclear and conventional chemical explosives, even assuming 0% transmission losses and 100% solar capture and 100% wind energy capture over the blade area of the windmills and tidal bouy generation systems and hydroelectic dams anywhere benificial so on, the methods proposed for electric power are insufficient to power the country at all times of day, because the peak generation times don't match the peak use times.

The power grid isn't a battery. It cannot store power. Without new coal plants, or nat. gas plants (shudder) or other fossil fuel plants, there isn't enough generation capacity to do what needs doing without nuclear plants. The plans to do ethanol make it worse. Ethanol takes electicity to make in quantity with consistant quality. It takes diesel fuel to make, unless we rebuild our agricultural infrastructure, and if we use ethanol to make corn to make ethanol, you end up with less ethanol than it took to grow the corn.

Plug-in hybrids, another of the hot technologys being pushed by envernmentalists, are, in themselves emission free for their electric only range. but they still require electricity. where we get it currently is primarily coal plants. These plants emitt less CO2 and other things per unit of power produced. The problem becomes one of distrubution and transmission, as most local area distribusion networks are already on the edge of overload, and the High voltage network isn't much better. Most substations are running at 120-150% their designed loads already, and even though they had large safety factors in the design and they went up a size in most cases to be safe and allow for expansion, the levels of power are begining to get to them. Wear goes up as power flow through the transformers goes up, and as wear goes up, efficiency goes down. Efficiency goes down, wear goes up. another viscious cycle.

1. Nuclear power, with reprocessing works as a primary power source, something to replace the coal plants that the environmentalists are screaming about. The radiation increase with a current generation of nuclear power plant is lower than that from a coal plant burning coal which has not been filtered for carbon 13. It is, at least if you disallow the lawsuits and such, cheaper in actual costs. We have the radioactives to run the plants. We even have the technology to do distributed generation with nuclear plants if we were prepared to accept marginally higher chances that someone could attack one.

2. Distributed generation is a good thing because it allows lower transmission losses, fewer critical failure points and more tailored responses. Right now, up to 20% of the power generated is lost due to transmission lines, transformers between different voltages and other infrastructure problems. If we cut the amount of power that needs to go through the almost-at-capacity transmission grid, and left it all in the distribution grids on a 3-5 county area scale, we could seriously cut loss, because not only do we not need to do multiple step-up/step down transisitions, we can lower the temperature of the transmission lines, reducing the resistance by a couple ohms, which is insignificant until you figure the scale into it.

The waste, assuming reprocessing, for all the new plants would be down to about 1/2 current levels, though of more radioactive but shorter lived isotopes. You stick them in someplace like Yucca mountain for between 50 and 1000 years (10-12 halflives, depending on isotope), sorting so that an area is generally "safe" around the same time and can be moved to a lower hazard storage area until it hits background.

Cath, if the FRENCH can do it with the tiny area of their country, and on the whole export power and have already done so, I do believe that putting in the best possible system to do nuclear reprocessing (a full generation newer and significantly better than Frances in-place system) makes those problems mostly with putting in the site and deciding where it goes.

The fuel keeps getting reused however it can be for as long as we can find a use for it. Lots better to do some reprocessing than the current situation, where the fuel is forced out of use as soon as its been used once, even though some of the isotopes in it can be used 10 or 20 times. The overall waste, even given expanded nuclear power to cover our primary power needs, is for the forseeable future lower than the current levels because while the amount of "waste" is increased, the "waste" can be split into a couple of other things and then used again, for purposes we are currently importing isotopes for.

Because its not something thats discussed much, the wikipedia article on Nuclear reprocessing is fairly well written and has the facts pretty solidly right.