nuclear pipedream

The one thing I have taken from this article and from our in class discussions about the oil spill in the gulf is that you can make numbers say whatever you want. In Kurt Kleiner's article on nuclear emissions you had us read for this assignment, he references Benjamin Sovacool a research fellow from Singapore University. He studied over 100 different lifecylce studies and found a range of carbon emissions from 1.6 grams of carbon dioxide equivilant per kilowatt-hour upto 288grams. This is very similar to the situation we brought up in class with the estimates on the oil spill. Even Sovacool had his own numbers. He certainly has alot to gain by proving this point. This is where I don't understand science. I thought it was a precise exercise but when humans and egos and money come into play all bets are off.
Another point from this article I found interesting was the amount of "front-end" emissions a nuclear plant would have. As far as mining the uranium the construction and so forth. Kleiner said it would take at least ten years just to construct a huge nuclear plant. Anyone who has driven to Chicago rescently has seen the huge on shore wind farm outside of Remington Indiana. That seemed to go up over night and the impact to the farm land was minimal. The landscape looks a little different now, but Im sure residents would rather look at soom really cool looking fans with no noise as opposed to a nucear facility and all the added security and not to mention the effect on their land.

oil and how it bcomes fuel

I have learned several new ideas and facts from this class. From why I should not be smoking, to what is in our drinking water, to things I can do to reduce my carbon footprint. The concept I found to be most interesting was the process by which we refine crude oil into all the finished products, such as gasoline. I knew the gasoline we put in our cars was not the stuff that came out of the ground, but I was pretty clueless about the process. Also the amount of different products that result from burning off at different temperatures was interesting as well.
Upon further investigating the wild and wonderful world of oil refineries I found and interesting aspect of the process to be the coking and cracking aspect.Cracking is essentially the breaking down of hydrogen molecules into lighter molecules at extremely high temperatures (600 degrees Cecilius). A cocker is used to heat and compress the crude oil into a hard coal like substance used for industrial fuel. I wonder if there is anyway to store hydrogen in a form like this? There is another form of molecular conversion known as alkylation. This process takes gas byproduct from cracking and combines them, essentially cracking in reverse. These three processes are part of the larger process at the refinery known as conversion.