It’s definitely still a science problem too.
That seems rather foolish…
No, it’s politics and nimby. Scientists can’t fix that.
The US found a geologically stable location to store it, nimby destroyed it before any materials made it there.
We can reprocess and recycle it, politics made it impossible.
No, it’s a science problem too (or rather a collection of science problems). Hope that helps clarify things for you.
Taiwan will have carbon emissions tax next year.
There should be a cap and that must be reduced over time to force them improve. Adding fees to the polluters will just be passed on to consumers.
That’s a stick. I think we also need better carrots.
Guy
ABC (the Australian one) revisits the nuclear issue in Taiwan, starting in Orchid Island and speaking to Indigenous residents about Taipower using their home as a low level nuclear waste dump; then off to northern Taiwan to speak to Angelica Oung, who has emerged as the most pro-nuclear enthusiast around. Of course she’s silent on the waste issue which remains unsolved (Taipower claims, according to this report, that they will resolve it by 2038—put otherwise, it has no solution).
Guy
Just so you know, low level waste is simply PPE and other stuff used at nuclear facilities. They’re not really that radioactive, at least not forever.
Just so you know, some parts of it can be fairly radioactive and contain radionuclides able to enter the environment, and there tends to be quite a large volume of it.
You have this canned response to every anti-nuclear power article, and regardless how many times it is brought up to you that geothermal power is viable in Taiwan, on-going in Taiwan, and a perfect baseload renewable energy for Taiwan, you never include that information in your canned response.
What do you have against geothermal power?
Ask the Taiwanese government what’s wrong. Why is it nothing more than a pilot project for decades until now?
A cursory look seems to suggest that Taiwan has one geothermal power plant (here) and some more projects in development (here), with a capacity on the order of 4 MW — let’s be generous and say <10 MW, including the projects in development.
That looks to be on the order of between one five-thousandth and one ten-thousandth of Taiwan’s total energy consumption (here). If this is so promising, why isn’t there more of it?
Probably something they know that we don’t realize. If Geothermal is so great, it would have been exploited to hell and back.
Had the money wasted on Nuclear Power Plant 4 been used to drill for geothermal energy, we’d have more than 20 geothermal power plants.
To just restart NP4 would cost 30 billion NTD. To drill for 6 super deep wells would only cost 170 million NTD.
Seems to be linked with induced earthquakes too — I wonder if that’s a concern (and even if it’s not, how well they’d stand up to Taiwan’s seismicity).
The issues has been discussed in multiple threads. I think I went into the details in this post though.
TLDR; version is there was no specific laws for geothermal power, and as a result, the law governing hotspring tourism was used to regulate geothermal power drilling in the past, and that made it impossible to do anything productive. Of course, any party in control of the legislative yuan could have changed that in the past 50 years. The KMT never did anything about it though. It was the Tsai government that got things done, and that’s why we are seeing more geothermal development in recent years.
Fracking is what induces earthquakes, but there are more way to get geothermal energy than frakcing.
It doesn’t look to be just fracking — the first link is about a deep geothermal project, and see also the “Geothermal energy” section of the Wikipedia article, which has more examples.
If you go read about NASA’s proposal of building a geothermal plant in Yellow Stone, you’d see that scientists think that introducing small tremors and injecting water to slightly cool down the super volcano might help us avoid an impending doom.
NP4 is basically hobbled by politics where construction started/stopped at the whims of the president/legislative yuan. Of course it’s expensive if you had to do this.
If they had a plant design, 100% finished, and no changes allowed during construction, it would be much cheaper. A lot of cost overruns is regulation and stuff.
That would necessitate a LOT of water I think. That’s a super caldera. Good luck cooling that monster down.