News Germany abandons nuclear power by 2022

[shashankac655]

Well, seawater contains 3.3 mg per cubic meter, and can be extracted relatively economically with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Recovery_from_seawater". (The only reason that's not currently economical is the even cheaper supply with other sources).

Aside from the 4.6 billion tons of uranium already in the oceans, rivers add about 32,000 tons per year.

Long story short, according to calculations by http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html" , we have enough uranium from seawater alone to last about 5 billion years. I would consider a power source which will easily outlast our sun to be a renewable energy source.

If so much uranium exists in the oceans naturally then may be the ecosystems in the oceans are dependent or are influenced in some way by the uranium so by consuming the uranium present in the oceans at a fast pace may affect the ocean's ecosystems in ways we may not know much about now.

You know how sensitive ocean ecosystems are don't you? a few degrees of temperature difference can do a lot damage so there is possibility that the ecosystems will be affected badly by slight changes in the concentration of some substances,i am not blindly speculating
i think it is obvious that presence of so much uranium in the oceans will have some important purpose to serve in the ecosystem( it can't be there without any purpose waiting for us to consume it for energy).

 

[mheslep]

If so much uranium exists in the oceans naturally then may be the ecosystems in the oceans are dependent or are influenced in some way by the uranium so by consuming the uranium present in the oceans at a fast pace may affect the ocean's ecosystems in ways we may not know much about now.

You know how sensitive ocean ecosystems are don't you? a few degrees of temperature difference can do a lot damage so there is possibility that the ecosystems will be affected badly by slight changes in the concentration of some substances,i am not blindly speculating ...
.

Yes that is exactly what you are doing. However, you don't need to and can at least speculate based on some data if you are willing to research the matter further.

 

[shashankac655]

Yes that is exactly what you are doing. However, you don't need to and can at least speculate based on some data if you are willing to research the matter further.

No country has started extracting uranium from sea water in commercial quantities as far as i know (correct me i am wrong) so i cannot give any research data but i have another argument ,nuclear power may last for over 5 billion years as mentioned earlier(with advanced reactor designs) only if the sun retains it's present state but check this out
Ocean free era.

So in a little more than 1 billion years Earth's oceans would have vaporized and Earth the marine ecosystems would have died out and the terrestrial ecosystems will follow and Earth would have become too hostile for humans to live (in fact we don’t have to wait for the oceans to evaporate in order to realize that Earth will no longer sustain multi-cellular life ,an increase in few degrees of temperature can kill all the coral reefs and bring an end to the marine ecosystems and terrestrial ecosystems will follow) now there will be 2 possibilities.

1. Humans will go extinct
2. Humans will manage to build settlements in outer planets or in their moons (titan or Europa etc) where the surface temperatures would have increased since sun would have become much brighter.
(Should we not at least try to be advanced enough to think about our energy needs beyond a few 100’s or 1000’s of years?)
Assuming No:2 is going to happen .Do you think we can afford to spend precious resources to look for uranium or other fissionable materials in outer space when we have been stripped off our home planet?
So depending on nuclear power too much just because we can will not do good in the long term, depending on nuclear power will be good in short term but you see such easily available energy source will slow down the research work on other renewable energy sources, (I don’t think the present world leaders are far sighted enough to allow money to be spent on research on alternate energy sources when there is no shortage in energy production at the present)

Just think about the problems we going to face in the next few hundred years (forget about the problems that are going to face after 1000’s or billions of years later) like the global warming and climate change , can you name one country that is really taking these relatively “less far away “ problems seriously ?has any big western country with high emission rates(like the US) agreed to cut down it’s emissions by significant proportions like by 70% or 90% ?the answer is no.

Why is this happening ?because it takes a lot of time , work and money for our modern civilization to switch completely from one energy source to another, so depending on nuclear technology on a large scale will make it very difficult and time consuming to switch over to other energy sources when the situation demands.

If our governments are so ignorant or incapable of solving problems that are going to affect us in such a short period of time(few 100 years) imagine the magnitude of difficulty regarding problems that are so far away(when we are addicted to one particular energy source ,it may even be invisible to them) and when they realize it ,it may be too late.The bottom line is if you are only interested in short term solutions to energy crisis go for nuclear power if not go for solar power.