[HN Gopher] EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green ...
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EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment
label: document
Author : accountinhn
Score : 332 points
Date : 2021-03-27 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| The future looks bleak for humans, better get a geiger counter
| and carry it with you.
| seanhandley wrote:
| This is a good move.
|
| Nuclear power is poorly understood and easily stigmatised but on
| balance is far less harmful than burning fossil fuels.
| dstick wrote:
| After having read Gates' latest book on climate change, one
| metaphor that stuck with me was the one on nuclear energy. It's
| as if the Wright brothers invented the first airplane, flew
| off, crashed, lost every passenger, and then we collectively
| dropped the entire technology and every promise it held. Never
| to be visited again. Humans are weird.
|
| (and I know the accidents were worse, but we iterated on car
| and plane safety, so why not energy safety?)
| lispm wrote:
| Actually many countries have developed nuclear technology in
| various forms over decades. The current latest generation of
| nuclear power plants (like the French EPR) is simply not cost
| effective. The Russian technology is nothing which would ever
| have a change to be deployed in a western country, due to its
| lower technical standards... Russia can't actually clean up
| its own nuclear installations.
| brudgers wrote:
| An interesting analogy considering the evidence of the
| airplane's role in regard to observed changes in atmospheric
| chemistry.
|
| But all analogies are like that...they need people to squint
| so details go fuzzy and merge.
|
| The Zeppelin is an equally plausible aircraft analogy.
| Theoretically it is possible for nothing to go wrong when
| taking dependencies on a quarter million hand sewn cow
| intestines.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Considering that the Hindenberg was destroyed by a bomb
| sneaked on board, the analogy is pretty good. The flames
| seen in the film were kerosene fuel ignited by the bomb.
| Humans have a way of causing their own disasters, when
| technical risks fail to deliver.
|
| And, more than 2/3 aboard at the time survived. Hard to say
| where this fits into any proposed analogy.
| makomk wrote:
| The actual answer is that we did improve on nuclear safety,
| and that all the regulations required to - for example - make
| sure that power plant designers didn't route all the
| redundant monitoring and control wiring down the same
| cableways and stuff them full of highly flammable foam are
| part of the reason nuclear power has become increasingly
| unaffordable. This is not some hypothetical example I'm
| making up, nuclear power plants in the US really did do that
| with predictable results and apparently the fire safety
| regulations really are a major cost. The Trump administration
| tried to fix this by giving more flexibility to designers,
| but of course that just made it proportionally harder to show
| the designs were safe and achieved nothing.
|
| Because of this, one common refrain from nuclear proponents
| on HN is that we should just get rid of all those safety
| regulations and go back to 70s-era levels of nuclear safety
| because it's safe enough, which would be like if we'd just
| accepted planes were unsafe back when accidents were more
| common and not tried to fix it. It also misses one of the key
| lessons of airplane safety: this kind of normalization of
| deviance is a major cause of serious accidents. For every
| major disaster, there is a chain of less serious incidents
| where things just didn't happen to align right to cause lots
| of deaths, until one day they did... and nuclear power has
| the potential for some really impressive disasters. It also
| probably wouldn't be enough to make nuclear power viable
| again; it has a lot of cost problems.
| dijit wrote:
| It's worse than that.
|
| It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight
| MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and
| declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all
| research into it as dangerous.
|
| The issue though, is that energy production is mostly quiet
| unless there's a problem, but people do see personal benefit
| in air travel.
|
| Add to that: Coal is a silent killer, it's not obvious that
| it's killing us and in such numbers as it is. Nuclear is a
| dramatic killer, when we die from radiation it's clear and
| obvious and horrific.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > It's like they succeeded and then many decades later
| flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its
| mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and
| condemned all research into it as dangerous.
|
| well, a lot of people simply refuse to air travel because
| of perceived safety issues
| belorn wrote:
| Interesting historical perspective since bomb planes
| transformed human warfare and was critical in the
| development of first ww1 and then more so during ww2. While
| not fully unique, the idea of killing the morale of the
| citizens rather than confronting the military was an
| insight many leader found from the bomb planes, and the
| idea of nuclear bombs are almost impossible without the
| idea of air travel.
| Haemm0r wrote:
| The comparison of a happening with basically no longterm
| consequences to future generations like MH17 to nuclear
| fallout / necessary waste treatment is quite lame imho.
|
| Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all.
| Just do the math if you need decades to dismantle and
| decontaminate an old nuclear power plant alone.
| nickik wrote:
| > Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at
| all.
|
| This is nonsense. We are basically using 60s technology
| that has some of these problems.
|
| A modern reactor facility could be 10-50x smaller for the
| same output and that makes think like decontamination
| cheaper as well. Also, these facilities can run 100 years
| potentially, so the amount of money required for
| decommissioning is amortized of gigantic amounts of
| energy.
|
| There is nothing inherent in nuclear that make it super
| expensive or unsustainable.
| doikor wrote:
| > Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at
| all
|
| And yet we seem to be doing just that here in Finland.
| The for profit companies operating and building the
| plants have been trying to get permits to build more (and
| very likely are going to get another one soon). Even with
| the "failure" of Olkiluoto 3 they seem to find a way to
| do it in a profitable enough way that they (2 companies
| TVO and Fennovoima) want to build more.
|
| There are no subsidies for nuclear power at all in
| Finland.
|
| Also our permanent spent fuel storage site is almost
| finished and should hold around 100 years of spent fuel.
| Though there have been now some talks to not really use
| it for most fuel as it makes more sense to build breeder
| reactors and just burn that fuel into much smaller
| amount. If that happens it will fit much more then 100
| year of spent fuel.
| pydry wrote:
| This reactor?
|
| >This month, the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in
| Finland was supposed to start producing power. Instead,
| the plant is at least three and a half years late and
| more than 50 percent over-budget. Olkiluoto was to be the
| "poster child" for the new generation of nuclear power
| plant designs that would drive the "Nuclear Renaissance"
| and if any nuclear project was going to go well. Instead,
| it has become an example of all that can go wrong in
| economic terms with new reactors. The vendor (Areva NP)
| and the utility are in bitter dispute over who will bear
| the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the
| utility will default.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130728115821/http://www.psr
| .or...
|
| There does seem to be another reactor being built in
| Finland, but it's being built by Russia.
| rhodozelia wrote:
| What's your point other than people generally sell large
| projects with a low up front number and it ends up being
| higher. Investors don't get the 3-4x return they wanted
| and have to settle for 2x. Or it takes longer to pay
| itself back.
|
| Solar and wind are expensive too if they are overbuilt 5x
| or backed up with enough batteries to be a firm source of
| power.
|
| How can anyone argue against nuclear being _part_ of the
| solution of reducing carbon emissions just because it
| takes more imaginary monetary tokens to build?
|
| Who cares who is building the reactor? Russia and China
| have the skill and the will to make it happen while
| everyone else is wringing their hands and continuing to
| pump out co2.
| doikor wrote:
| > The vendor (Areva NP) and the utility are in bitter
| dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is
| a real risk now that the utility will default.
|
| With the contract TVO signed with Siemens and Areva for
| the plant they will never end up having to pay all the
| cost overruns. It was basically a fixed price contract.
|
| What ended up happening is Siemens got the fuck out of
| the deal (it was originally a Siemens and Areva joint
| project) and French government broke up Areva Group into
| smaller entities and took a hit on the failed project.
| From the legal fighting Areva agreed to pay TVO 450
| million due to failing to deliver on time with some extra
| money going one way or another based on if it will
| deliver in the new revised timelines (ended up Areva
| having to pay TVO another 450 million).
|
| According to TVO at the end of the day the project cost
| them 5 billion instead of the original 3.2 billion with
| Areva saying it cost the 8.5 billion so Areva took a huge
| hit on making a bad contract and/or failing to deliver.
| corty wrote:
| Finland seems to have gotten the prototype, the same
| reactor type has been finished in China, twice:
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Taishan
|
| However, also 50% over budget.
| Haemm0r wrote:
| Where is the money coming from for the mentioned reactor?
| According to the wikipedia page a lot of French money is
| involved of a company connected to the French state..
| edit: A breeder would for sure be a good way to reduce
| waste as you said..
| doikor wrote:
| For Olkiluoto 3 TVO got the original 3.2 billion from its
| owners and some loans. And it was a fixed price contract
| but TVO has given into Areva a bit and is now projecting
| that it will cost them 5 billion. Areva at the moment
| projects the total price to be 8.5 billion so they will
| be taking a loss on it (who is going to pay what part of
| the overruns was in some courts at one point haven't
| really followed up if there was some verdict and what it
| was)
|
| Funnily enough most of these loans are from German banks
| and various export agencies backed by the French
| government. Even still all these loans were given at
| market rates so EU would not kill the project (Greenpeace
| etc did make a complaint to EU and a investigation was
| done)
|
| This kind of seller arranging some part of the loans is
| very normal in large infrastructure projects like these.
|
| The other new project I mentioned is Hanhiviki in which
| Rosatom won the bidding. Areva and Toshiba also left
| their bids but as I understand it Areva was thrown out
| due to their failure to deliver Olkiluoto 3 in
| time/budget and Toshibas bid was not competetive. Though
| this Hanhikivi plant is still waiting for permits and
| there has been some obvious issues with it being built by
| Rosatom and the Russian sanctions going around. It also
| has some American and UK interests as Rosatom contracted
| the turbines to some GE subsidiary and Rolls Royce.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Pla
| nt
| rhodozelia wrote:
| In British Columbia Canada we are building a 1000 MW
| hydro plant called site C for 10-12 billion. We have been
| doing studies on the site for 30+ years and it will be 10
| years construction time by the time it is finished.
|
| Nuclear looks pretty good in comparison.
| didibus wrote:
| Ya, but the challenge, and I say that as a supporter of
| Nuclear in general, is that you don't sign up for the
| experiment. If you're in the radius of the plant if it were
| to fail, you might be wary of it.
| pitaj wrote:
| People don't sign up for pollution from fossil fuels
| either.
| didibus wrote:
| It's an emotional response though, like how there are
| still more people with a parallizing fear of flight that
| don't have a problem hopping into a car.
|
| Like I said, I'm not justifying being against Nuclear,
| but explaining the challenge with Nuclear's general
| acceptance, there is a fear response from people, and
| it'll need to be curbed and addressed. That fear response
| is due to the grandiose nature of a Nuclear failure which
| fossil fuel don't have, even if they kill you slowly and
| might lead to world ending catastrophies.
| kcmastrpc wrote:
| Yes, they do. If you drive a car, heat your home via
| gas/electricity, use the internet (to post this) -- you
| signed up for it.
| kergonath wrote:
| How so? Do the particulates and aerosols avoid me
| breathing them in because I don't drive a car and use
| electric heating? How does it work?
|
| Pollution from fossil fuel is unavoidable in quite a lot
| of places regardless of your life style. Also, much more
| deadly than anything related to nuclear so far.
| oblio wrote:
| That's not how it works :-)
|
| I don't smoke but until they started banning smoking
| everywhere, plenty of people would sign me up for passive
| smoking without asking me anything.
| pitaj wrote:
| Okay then by the same logic people do sign up for nuclear
| by using the electricity for their homes, the internet,
| etc
| tarboreus wrote:
| I think it really comes down to the A-bomb and how large it
| loomed in the left politics of the mid-twentieth century.
| Unfortunately, I think well-meaning greens have majorly
| contributed to climate change by opposing nuclear. The
| mistake is understandable, but we need to be reversing it as
| fast as possible.
| chpatrick wrote:
| As far as I know there are also economic problems with
| nuclear. Nuclear power plants are enormous investments, then
| take decades to build and eventually decomission. If
| renewable energy gets efficient enough, nuclear is not worth
| the effort.
| gcheong wrote:
| It would depend heavily on the reactor design. Smaller more
| modularized reactors can probably be built much cheaper
| with economies of scale by widespread installation.
| Renewables have hard limits as to how efficient they can
| ever be and they started out expensive too and heavily
| subsidized by government.
| lokimedes wrote:
| It's actually pretty easy to build a nuclear reactor, but
| is as expensive to make it safe today as it is to maintain
| a Windows NT 4.0 server in 2021 when it comes to making it
| regulatory compliant.
|
| Also when comparing nuclear to "renewable" energy, you are
| really comparing distributed low density investments with
| monolithic ones. Nuclear is 1e6 the energy density of
| chemical reactions. And wind/solar is basically heat
| exchangers positioned 8 light minutes from the nuclear
| reactor. The Sun incidentally, is just as renewable as that
| Uranium we are discussing.
|
| What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a
| bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with
| fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a
| stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the
| Engineers knowing better than me :)
| oblio wrote:
| > What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect
| a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with
| fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a
| stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the
| Engineers knowing better than me :)
|
| I don't work in this field, but I'd have a bunch of basic
| assumption you could dismantle:
|
| 1. We need a solid power grid, anyway, you know, for
| transporting electricity where it's needed. So shouldn't
| that stitching be quite solid anyway? Also, at a national
| level, I'd imagine solar and wind probably have rather
| solid statistical patterns, and those random factors can
| be abstracted away to a degree (the whole "what happens
| when the wind is not blowing?" - kind of hard to have the
| wind stop blowing all over 300k sqkm, all at once :-) ).
|
| 2. Once that power grid is solid, does it matter how
| small and distributed those solar and wind patches are?
|
| 3. I don't think Lithium-Ion is the only/main energy
| storage tech being investigated/invested in for grid
| purposes. And why couldn't it become a solid alternative
| for base load? Are base load-capacity energy storage
| facilities not competitive with gas/nuclear/coal power
| plants, factoring in pollution or other risks?
| rhodozelia wrote:
| Imagine how overbuilt and under utilized a communications
| network would have to be in order for it to work the same
| way people imagine solar and wind power can be
| transported across the country.
|
| Networks offer the best return on investment when they
| are fully utilized not sitting idle.
| pydry wrote:
| This is the real issue. It's 3x as expensive as other
| renewables. Every dollar of subsidy producing 1 MWh of
| nuclear could provide 3 MWh of solar or wind.
|
| Added to which, being a baseload power source is not nearly
| as useful as being dispatchable (like hydro and natural gas
| are), and it's _insanely_ capital intensive (which leads to
| cost overruns - see hinkley point c, corruption & fat
| profit margins).
|
| It's got real lobbying muscle though, especially from
| defense and military.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I see you still haven't learned what dispatchable means.
| pydry wrote:
| Do you disagree with Wikipedia's definition?
|
| "Dispatchable plants have varying startup times. The
| fastest plants to dispatch are hydroelectric power plants
| and natural gas power plants. For example, the 1,728 MW
| Dinorwig pumped storage power plant can reach full output
| in 16 seconds.[4] Although theoretically dispatchable,
| coal and nuclear thermal plants are designed to run as
| base load power plants and may take hours or sometimes
| days to cycle off and then back on again."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| From the same article:
|
| "Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity
| that can be dispatched on demand at the request of power
| grid operators, according to market needs. Dispatchable
| generators can adjust their power output according to an
| order.[1] Non-dispatchable renewable energy sources such
| as wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) power cannot be
| controlled by operators."
|
| https://www.nmppenergy.org/feature/dispatchable%20resourc
| es
|
| "Dispatchable fuel resources include nuclear, coal and
| natural gas. These fuel sources are highly reliable
| because each fuel is a constant supply. These are known
| as baseload resources."
|
| https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Nuclear-stands-
| out-a...
|
| "Nuclear stands out as clean, dispatchable firm power,
| says Kwarteng"
|
| You are confusing dispatchable with flexible.
| pitaj wrote:
| The economic problems are tied directly to policy problems,
| like the broken regulatory structure. For instance, as I
| understand it, a nuclear plant that began construction 10
| years ago and is ready to go online by the standards when
| it began construction has to comply with all regulations
| created since. This makes creating new plants very
| expensive.
| jhgb wrote:
| > like the broken regulatory structure
|
| Doubt it.
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-
| lays-...
|
| > It turns out that the main reason for spiraling nuclear
| plant construction bills is soft costs, the indirect
| expenses related to activities such as engineering
| design, purchasing, planning, scheduling and --
| ironically -- estimating and cost control.
|
| > These indirect expenses accounted for 72 percent of the
| increase seen in reactor construction costs between 1976
| and 1987, a period in which the amount of money needed
| for containment buildings rose by almost 118 percent.
| natch wrote:
| I don't know, cost differences that exemplify the concept of
| "orders of magnitude" could be one reason.
| anoncake wrote:
| It's also unsuitable as a long-term solution and too slow to
| build for a a short-term solution. So all it is is a
| distraction.
| natch wrote:
| It's far more centralized and prone to overly bloated
| government contracts, big industry, corruption, accounting
| shenanigans, excessive taxation to pay for the mistakes, and
| loss of individual freedom and control over where your energy
| dollars go to. Especially as compared to solar but it's even
| bad compared to fossil fuels in these respects.
| oblio wrote:
| After solar and wind take off completely, the reality is that
| for 99% of people out there, they will be as centralized as
| nuclear is. Both because of industry consolidation and
| because of practical realities.
| hekker wrote:
| Curious, I am pro nuclear as well, looking at the technological
| benefits, but how are we practically going to handle nuclear
| waste that will be there for thousands of future generations to
| handle?
| pitaj wrote:
| Nuclear waste storage isn't a technology issue: we know how
| to store it safely. It's an issue of political
| obstructionism.
| hekker wrote:
| If that's true why would be this obstructionism be there?
| It does not make any rational sense if we can use nuclear
| to win us time until we have working fusion and/or
| wind/sun/etc energy implemented.
| loeg wrote:
| > If that's true why would be this obstructionism be
| there? _It does not make any rational sense_ if we can
| use nuclear to win us time until we have working fusion
| and /or wind/sun/etc energy implemented.
|
| You said it -- it's irrational.
| kergonath wrote:
| A combination of NIMBY, genuine concerns, poor education
| and political point scoring.
|
| It does not make any rational sense.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >why would be this obstructionism be there
|
| The short answer is the oil lobby.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| I've been thinking about nuclear this last week and i have some
| assumptions that i would appreciate if somebody more
| knowledgeable can quickly filter:
|
| We want more energy per person in the future.
|
| Stable energy is required to make industry sustainable.
|
| Stable 'free' energy allows you to do really cool new things
| (like melt trash for resources?)
|
| Waste & environmental impact is negligible compared to fossil
| fuels.
|
| A nation needs to agree to the risk/reward of a nuclear power
| plant, it must be owned and payed for primarily by the
| government.
|
| Having a country/state that offers free energy will pay itself
| back easily. Cost should not be an issue, 20 % of GDP should be
| on the table. ( Money is made up, Jules are real ).
|
| Solar and wind are mostly done innovating. Nuclear has a
| relatively clear path of improvements ahead in terms of $/joule.
|
| Storage based on hydrogen or thermal are too inefficient and
| don't scale well enough to power homes and industries during the
| winter.
|
| Any comments are welcome.
| Hypx wrote:
| Energy storage based on hydrogen can easily scale up to power
| homes and industry during the winter: https://www.pv-
| magazine.com/2020/06/16/hydrogen-storage-in-s...
|
| We have petawatt-hours worth of storage capacity.
| Krasnol wrote:
| It still remains a waste of money if you have other sources:
|
| https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099...
|
| Nuclear is just too slow to fix our CO2 problems
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
| effie wrote:
| What else do you propose as replacement for coal and gas power
| plants?
|
| Who expects nuclear energy to fix our CO2 problems? In the
| following decades, it is supposed to slow down CO2 buildup, not
| "fix our CO2 problems".
| Krasnol wrote:
| > What else do you propose as replacement for coal and gas
| power plants?
|
| Renewables
|
| > Who expects nuclear energy to fix our CO2 problems?
|
| It's the main claim of the Nuclear AstroTurf campaign.
|
| > In the following decades, it is supposed to slow down CO2
| buildup, not "fix our CO2 problems".
|
| As I've shown: it is not the appropriate tool to do that in
| an efficient way.
| effie wrote:
| It is not realistic to power current developed societies
| using only solar and wind power. For simple reason - we
| can't store energy well.
|
| Stop throwing up and shooting down strawmen. Nuclear energy
| was never going to replace all energy sources. Only the
| worst ones, like coal and gas power plants.
| pdog wrote:
| If you're worried about nuclear waste, why not build small
| nuclear reactors way out in the desert and encase them in
| concrete for a couple hundred years once you're done with them?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Germany is notably lacking in both deserts and anything
| reasonably considered "way out".
| shoo wrote:
| David MacKay's book "sustainable energy: without the hot air" has
| a section that estimates if nuclear fission might work as a large
| scale long-lived energy source
|
| http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_161.shtml
| jdsully wrote:
| Crazy they were able to label natural gas as "sustainable" but
| nuclear just barely squeaked in.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Natural gas or biogas? Same gas but the first is fossil while
| the other is made from fermenting sewage and hence renewable
| loeg wrote:
| Either? The problem is that combusting it produces CO2.
| enkid wrote:
| Methane is going to come out of sewage whether we process
| it or not, and methane itself is a greenhouse gas. It's not
| going to come out of the ground without help (in the
| quantities we are using).
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas, however
| it breaks down rather quickly.
|
| Like I said in a sibling post, the big advantage is that
| biogas is Net 0 carbon wise as you're reusing carbon
| already in the carbon cycle
| mlyle wrote:
| ... it's incredibly potent as CH4... and then it "breaks
| down" into CO2 and H2O.
|
| I think enkid's point is agreeing with you: might as well
| burn that sewage CH4 for energy-- you end up with the
| same CO2 in the end and less CH4 in the atmosphere in the
| short term.
| loeg wrote:
| Sure, burn that methane. Is there enough of that to many
| any significant impact on energy needs?
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Most busses and taxis in Sweden run on it, so there's
| that
| jnurmine wrote:
| And the gas comes from biowaste, which is actually nice,
| because municipalities which have the most effective ways
| of collecting and processing biowaste can export the
| resulting biogas to e.g. surrounding municipalities and
| in this way generate income to run things for everyone.
|
| This means waste must be sorted somehow, but this is a
| rational thing to do anyways.
|
| And it pisses me off immensely to see some idiots throw
| plastic bags or non-food waste to the biowaste bins.
| There are signs in many languages and even with pictures,
| but some people still manage. Such biowaste cannot be
| used for gas generation, so it's kind of hurting all the
| inhabitants.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Not quite, it depend where the carbon forming the CO2 comes
| from. Carbon extracted from sewage is already in the carbon
| cycle giving a net 0 carbon when burned. Extracting and
| burning fossile carbon ADDS carbon to the cycle, hence the
| problem
| godelski wrote:
| Or we could extract it and not burn it, making it "carbon
| negative".
|
| Though your comment has a problem. It isn't carbon that
| is the problem, it is carbon in the air. If we did 100%
| CO2 extraction from coal fire plants they wouldn't be a
| real climate issue (overly simplified). Similarly we
| can't consider sewage as a carbon 0 cycle because eating
| turns a solid carbon source (food) into a gas. Carbon is
| fine, carbon in the air is not fine. Sewage is only
| neutral in the respect that we've already converted it to
| a gas (unless we accelerate this process, which is
| typically done) but doesn't account for the conversion
| process that happens.
| hedora wrote:
| If the CO2 was recently extracted from the atmosphere, then
| burning the gas is carbon neutral.
|
| It might be more thermodynamically favorable to use the gas
| as input to a carbon capture process. Even if that is the
| case, bootstrapping a market for biogas will lower the cost
| of biogas. In turn, that will lower the cost of biogas-
| based carbon sequestration.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Right, but that's one of several components of
| sustainability. Another component is whether the energy
| source is renewable, which biogas is.
| _Microft wrote:
| Not at all. Problem is that gas from fossil sources adds
| extra carbon to the short term carbon cycle while biogas
| does not (because the carbon fixated was already in the
| short term cycle).
| belorn wrote:
| Biogas is very similar to farming. You can produce meat and
| vegetables with net 0 carbon, and both can operate on using
| waste from other industries.
|
| The problem comes when one introduce fossil fuels into the
| production chain because it makes economical sense to do so.
| jdsully wrote:
| It says natural gas in the article. If it were something as
| specific as biogas I imagine it would have been mentioned.
| cletus wrote:
| Here we go again:
|
| 1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion
| Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1];
|
| 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the
| waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to
| spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost
| and safety issues;
|
| 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment
| byproducts (eg UF6, UF4) that have their own problems;
|
| 4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue; and
|
| 5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.
|
| The big problems with nuclear aren't technical they're political
| but they are no less significant. For me, I just don't trust
| humans--either government entities or for-profit enterprises--to
| safely and responsibly build and manage a nuclear power plants as
| well as all the infrastructure to mine, process, transport,
| reprocess and store any byproducts.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone
| ncmncm wrote:
| These.
|
| Furthermore:
|
| 1. Nuclear has _always_ been the most expensive alternative,
| moreso now than ever before. Its advocates knew this at the
| time that they were calling it "too cheap to meter". Even
| continuing to operate an _existing_ plant costs more than
| building out renewables and switching to those.
|
| 2. Nuclear construction projects invariably turn into massive
| pipelines for corruption and graft, siphoning $billions or tens
| of $billions from public budgets into well-connected private
| hands before ever delivering any power. Renewable projects
| (with the exception of larger dams) have not typically catered
| to corruption. "Small nuke" has never got traction, despite
| apparent efficiencies, specifically because it offers so little
| scope for long-term corruption. (E.g., the US government just
| granted a measly $10 million to one company to promote it.)
|
| 3. Nuclear construction takes so long that any supposed benefit
| comes far too late to do much good. The same money spent on
| renewables always starts delivering immediately, in much larger
| amounts, when it is most needed. The money saved on the much
| cheaper power can be spent immediately building out more, for
| even more benefit, compounding.
|
| As an aside, Tokamak fusion will _never, ever_ produce so much
| as one solitary erg of commercially competitive energy. The
| current ITER project is not projected to do _anything_ until
| 2050 (although it will take hundreds of megawatts to fire up,
| for experiments), and then is not so much as planned to deliver
| practical power, _ever_ , despite costing tens of $billions.
| The "practical" plant they imagine building, to turn on at
| _end-of-century_ (after all of us reading this are dead!),
| would need to be an order of magnitude larger, and cost
| $trillions and decades without producing, all the while
| stealing capital from actually viable projects.
|
| The only rational conclusion is that Tokamak fusion research is
| and was never intended to produce practical power. The whole
| program is, rather, purely a jobs program for hot-neutron
| physicists and contractors, to maintain a population to draw on
| for weapons work. Every cent spent on Tokamak fusion is stolen
| from research on alternatives that could, in principle, be
| practical.
|
| (The one valuable output of Tokamak research is a generation of
| physicists now comfortable with plasma fluid-dynamics
| mathematics.)
| godelski wrote:
| > 1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes.
|
| Do you have a source? There's plenty of larger fossil fuel
| catastrophes that just aren't well known because they are in
| third world countries, so who gives a fuck, right? [0] (note
| that this is 1700 square miles) I'm not sure this point if
| about environmental damage or human not being able to live
| there damage. If the former, I think climate change is a pretty
| apparent counter point. If the latter, well the size of that is
| largely political but you can think of it as an unexpected
| opening of a national forest. Sure, sucks for humans, but all
| the trees are great for climate (hell, killing humans is great
| for climate, but that's not popular).
|
| > 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to
| the waste problem.
|
| Reprocessing isn't necessary. There's little reason to with our
| current industry, and even France's. Storage is easy. You place
| it on site. We have a few hundred years to figure out deep
| geological repositories (which I also advocate for plastics,
| heavy metals, and other non-degradable toxic substances). We
| just don't have enough and it isn't dangerous enough for this
| to be a problem. Nuclear waste is hundreds of thousands of
| times smaller than other energy sources (500,000x less than
| coal). You all act like this is a problem that only nuclear
| has. It isn't even close to being the biggest perpetrator. It
| is a good criticism, but if you are only applying this
| criticism to one product I'm not convinced it is a concern you
| actually have but rather you're just holding "enemies" to
| higher standards.
|
| > 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store
| enrichment byproducts (eg UF6, UF4) that have their own
| problems
|
| This is a restatement of 2 unless you're talking about weapons,
| which my response would be that you clearly do not understand
| the difference between weapons and reactors. As a side note,
| understanding this difference is key to understanding the Iran
| Deal and why no one is concerned that they produced more
| enriched material than the deal allowed (i.e. it was a
| political gesture and _could only be_ a political gesture).
|
| > 4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue
|
| And? It is stored on site. Energy production plants of any kind
| are a security issue.
|
| > 5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.
|
| See 4.
|
| And congrats, you hit 5/10 of the common myths[1].
|
| Now if you said that nuclear power plants were too expensive,
| we could have a real discussion and there would be differing
| opinions based on different criteria and hopeful/naive
| projections. But we can't even have that conversation if you
| aren't willing to just google the opposition's answers to your
| questions that have been continually asked for decades. I'm
| just reminded of this Futurama episode (which I just noticed
| makes a flat earth joke)[2]. We don't need more Dr. Banjos.
|
| [0] https://medium.com/@renegadeinc/the-amazon-
| chernobyl-6309a19... or
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikneKQAeUp0
|
| [1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-
| fu...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-RUHhCzgxI
| pharke wrote:
| Counter point. We _must_ learn how to responsibly manage
| extremely dangerous materials and technologies. It is the only
| way we can avoid inevitable extinction at our own hands as
| technology advances. Atomic weapons are no longer the only
| existential threat we are capable of wielding, we are rapidly
| approaching the ability to engineer de novo viruses and
| eventually self replicating cells. We already possess the means
| to create autonomous weapons systems and are improving upon
| them daily. As access to space becomes commercialized it will
| become increasingly trivial to deliver un-interceptable
| payloads to anywhere on earth and they needn 't be explosive
| since a large enough mass travelling fast enough is more than
| capable of demolishing any building. Extrapolate further into
| the future and if we master high enough energy density
| batteries or capacitors then we start having to worry about
| directed energy weapons, imagine a hand held device capable of
| generating an instantaneous lethal dose of X-rays. I'm sure
| we're also capable of thinking up a long list of even more
| deadly weapons let alone beneficial technologies that could be
| mishandled. We can't turn back to a simpler time, we have to
| take the bull by the horns.
| bliteben wrote:
| would you support fusion power, or are you a one fusion reactor
| per solar system kind of guy?
| cletus wrote:
| Some solar systems have 2 or even 3 fusion reactors. :)
|
| The answer to your question depends on the characteristics of
| the technology. There are many proposed variations (eg the
| traditional H-H including heavier isotopes, He3, pB).
|
| For fuels, deuterium is abundant in the environment
| environment so isn't an issue. Tritium decays quickly. This
| is a fairly common theme with lighter elements. U235 on the
| other hand is extremely problematic for being both a heavy
| metal, long-lived and radioactive.
|
| But I'm not yet convinced we'll actually have commercial
| fusion power. Aneutronic variants aside, neutron
| embrittlement and the energy loss from neutrons are
| significant unsolved problems. Even with powerful magnets,
| containing a fluid at 100M Kelvin is a significant problems,
| inherently so because of turbulence.
|
| I hope relatively cheap fusion power is in our future but
| there's no clear path forward yet.
|
| None of these have particularly problematic byproducts.
| tpmx wrote:
| Germany's populistic policy decisions following Fukushima set us
| back so much.
| j-pb wrote:
| Fukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved that,
| again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be not
| neglegible enough.
|
| I don't care if nuclear can be made safe on paper, as long as
| it's build by humans it's going to be messed up somehow.
|
| I once took a school trip to a nuclear power station in
| northern germany, turns out they had a direct link to their
| local coal plant to manage demand. That link was unsecured
| radiowaves directly interacting with their safety critial
| systems. Their defense was "it's point to point, so you'd have
| to build a tower beteen." Yeah or wait 15 years and buy a
| drone.
|
| And we still haven't the tech to get rid of the waste products.
|
| The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany
| enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
|
| And that's only the long term cost of pulling it out of the
| ground. The costs of putting it safely away for a million
| literal years is not included.
| lrem wrote:
| We don't have all that many tsunamis in Germany...
| anoncake wrote:
| I'm sure our nuclear plants are safe against all
| foreseeable dangers. So only unforeseeable dangers are a
| problem. I can't foresee any, so we're safe?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Nothing is perfectly safe. Hydro dams fail. Wind turbines
| throw ice. People fall off roofs installing solar.
|
| But 8 million people per year are killed by particulate
| emissions from normally-operating fossil and biofuel
| combustion plants. Nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro are
| all orders of magnitude safer ways, per TWh generated,
| than the dominant worldwide sources. Therefore we should
| replace fossil and biofuel with nuclear, wind, solar, and
| hydro.
|
| Conveniently, those 4 are also very low carbon, so they
| prevent climate change along the way.
|
| [1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-
| pollution#tab=tab_1
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
| anoncake wrote:
| Killing a predictable number of people each year is not
| danger, it's damage. The danger posed by hydro is real,
| but entirely negligible compared to nuclear.
|
| But _of course_ we should replace fossils by renewables
| and phase them out before nuclear. And if nuclear wouldn
| 't take too long to build building new nuclear plants as
| a stopgap may actually make sense. Unfortunately, they
| do.
| Hani1337 wrote:
| No but we have a lot of terrorists
| kergonath wrote:
| "A lot of terrorists"? In Germany? I'm not saying it is
| perfect, but you might want to balance a bit your news
| sources.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Modern nuclear power plants such as the German Konvoi or
| modern Russian VVER survive plane crashes. Some German
| plants even have military defense systems on site.
| oblio wrote:
| > The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy
| Germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
|
| Germany needs nuclear for base load. The current alternatives
| for base load are natural gas (meh, but maybe not horrible)
| and coal (horribly dirty, and Germany transitioned from
| nuclear to coal [!!!], making their energy mix dirtier than
| the French one, as France still uses a ton of nuclear power
| plants).
|
| Solar can't be used for base load at the moment.
| fulafel wrote:
| Base load is just a made up convention though closely
| related to traditional fixed rate prices, and may become
| increasingly fictional in the future as demand adapts to
| more variable supply and dynamic pricing.
| tpmx wrote:
| > Base load is just a made up convention.
|
| Seriously.
| [deleted]
| fulafel wrote:
| Ok, bad wording. How about: It emerges from conventional
| fixed supply. In any case it's no law of nature. So not a
| concept that is necessarily relevant in the furure.
| oblio wrote:
| Base load results from demand, not from supply. You
| positively, absolutely must provide a certain amount of
| power at all times.
|
| > In any case it's no law of nature.
|
| Yes it is. It's a law of human nature :-)
| fulafel wrote:
| The relationship of supply and demand in the grid is an
| equation, if they don't match you get blackouts or other
| funky things. When you have dynamic pricing, variable
| supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any
| fixed amount of power.
|
| Yeah,base load still exists as in the dictionary
| definition (floor of aggregate power supply and demand),
| but it ceases to be a fixed level that is a hard
| production quota.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works
| out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount
| of power.
|
| No, thats not really how it works out.
|
| Baseload should actually be called baseload demand. The
| idea of baseload demand, is that there is some minimum
| level of electricity, that will always be demanded,
| almost no matter how high prices go.
|
| Or, in other words, there is some about electricity
| demand is very inelastic.
|
| So no, you can't just increase electricity costs. Because
| then electricity costs will massively spike, and cause
| huge amounts of problems.
|
| You are massively underestimating the amount of problems
| and costs that it would put in people for demand to be as
| elastic as you want it to be.
|
| It would be way cheaper and better for everyone, if there
| was simply enough baseload supply to meet the baseload
| demand.
| tpmx wrote:
| I think the situation in Texas recently illustrated this
| pretty well.
| fulafel wrote:
| Big problems maybe at first sight, but there are many
| ways of overcoming them. When automated price following
| behaviour is implemented in eg AC and heating and car
| charging systems, the spikes will be greatly lessened.
| Also, energy storage actors can sell into spikes, which
| will work to clip the spikes and encourage investment
| into energy storage.
| [deleted]
| tsimionescu wrote:
| So you believe the grid can be said to be working well
| with occasional dips to 0MWh? Or is some base load in
| fact an obvious necessity?
|
| You may argue that the current value of the base load is
| artificially high, but there obviously is some
| fundamental base load given by the kinds of consumers you
| have.
| fulafel wrote:
| It's unlikely to hit 0 even at night, no reason to stop
| all the windmills and hydro, and there will be stored
| energy buyers and sellers. But there won't be production
| guarantees to some level based on anticipated demand.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I know it's unlikely, but the point was that there exists
| _some_ minimum need of energy, even in the most flexible
| grid imaginable, some base load necessary.
| fulafel wrote:
| Technically yes, I guess the grid has to be kept
| energized to work.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So you believe the grid can be said to be working well
| with occasional dips to 0MWh?
|
| With distributed generation and storage, yes, it's
| plausible to have periods of 0MW grid demand.
|
| > there obviously is some fundamental base load given by
| the kinds of consumers you have.
|
| The kinds of consumers you have are not a fixed quantity;
| particularly their on-site use, generation, and storage
| patterns all vary over time.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I'm talking about 0 MWh for the entire grid, which
| includes all of the distributed generators. So, by
| definition, shutting down each and every piece of
| electric equipment connected to the entire grid. You
| truly believe that is a tenable position?
|
| If not, than you must accept there exists _some_
| necessary base load. That can be provided from base
| production like it is today, or it could theoretically be
| provided from storage and over-production in a
| hypothetical renweables-only grid.
| oblio wrote:
| > demand adapts to more variable supply and dynamic
| pricing
|
| You want demand to adapt? I'm supposed to turn the lights
| out when the wind's not blowing, or what?
|
| Demand shouldn't adapt, supply should adapt. Connect more
| and bigger power grids, add energy storage to the grid in
| large enough quantities.
|
| Your "solution" is like telling people to give up cars.
| They won't.
| fulafel wrote:
| Yes, you get the gist of my position (for cars too).
| oblio wrote:
| It's unrealistic. Policy based on everyone living in
| Neverland doesn't work.
| tpmx wrote:
| So when it gets really cold and there's little wind,
| we'll freeze to death? Gotcha.
| fulafel wrote:
| People who decided to use directly grid electricity for
| heating but are not willing or able to pay for it during
| cold spells will find they have a summer house. Consumers
| can of course have electricity contracts that have fixed
| monthly prices as a derivative bought from electricity
| market actors. As the transition doesn't happen
| overnight, people and the social safety net will have
| time to cope and adapt.
|
| In cold climates people have increasingly well insulated
| houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly
| use non grid electric heating. And can also shift power
| usage around the day because it takes a day or so for the
| house to cool uncomfortably.
| tpmx wrote:
| Well, it's good that you're transparent. People should
| abandon their homes because of your policy.
|
| Which energy sources that emit less co2/kWh than nuclear
| power should be used to heat houses in that case?
|
| > (In cold climates people have well insulated houses
| that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use
| non electricity heating, like thus far)
|
| What are talking about? What kind of non-electricity
| heating? Let's burn some coal or what?
|
| I'm in Sweden. It gets cold. Houses are well insulated
| and typically heated via quite efficient electric air-to-
| air or air-to-water heat pumps. Our electricity has been
| like 98% co2 neutral since the 70s because of a 50/50 mix
| of hydro and nuclear as a base load.
|
| Now, ironically, the leftist politicians (including the
| green party) here are dismantling all of this because
| they and the journalists don't understand the concept of
| base power, because they don't understand the difference
| between power and energy. Their solution is to build lots
| and lots of wind power plants.
| fulafel wrote:
| So why would the electricity prices become unaffordable
| for heat pump heating in your well insulated houses with
| local hydro and nuclear power?
|
| By non electric heating methods I meant CHP and biomass
| based heating.
|
| But yes, old energy inefficient houses in cold climates
| should be replaced. There's no need to get dramatic over
| it, houses are machines for living and it depends on
| circumstances how far to extend their lifespan. (Except
| some historical houses of course)
| tpmx wrote:
| > So why would the electricity prices become unaffordable
| for heat pump heating in your well insulated houses with
| local hydro and nuclear power?
|
| Umm. This whole thread is about the existence of nuclear
| power. Is it hard to understand that if nuclear power
| went away, the baseload would become extremely expensive
| during cold and wind-free days? That's a substantial part
| of the year, here.
| fulafel wrote:
| In a nuclear rampdown scenario, hopefully it would not
| come as an overnight surprise. Usually there are plans on
| a 10 year timescale or more. But I'm not arguing against
| nuclear, just for dynamic electricity pricing.
| j-pb wrote:
| Yeah but wind and solar on a european power grid can.
|
| A nuclear power plant that's finished in 10 years is not
| gonna provide you with the baseload to stop climate change.
|
| That's only possible with expanding the existing tech we
| have.
| kergonath wrote:
| But gas-fired power plants will?
|
| We won't stop climate change, we're decades late. What we
| need is everything we ca have, which includes solar and
| wind where appropriate, but also nuclear. The fact that
| people pretending to care about climate change are
| pushing for gas is absurd.
| tpmx wrote:
| I was writing a comment on how hard/impossible it is to get
| politicians to understand the fundamentals of what makes an
| electric grid work - then I saw the other comments here and
| despaired.
|
| It's like all the people who didn't understand grade 7-9
| physics conspired to make us all miserable.
| oblio wrote:
| Is it grade 7-9 physics, though? I learned about power
| grid structure (base load, etc.) and such at the
| university.
|
| To the down voters: just because you learn about
| electricity in secondary school, it doesn't mean that the
| second or third level effects are obvious and that you
| immediately understand what their impact on a power grid
| is. But hey, maybe some people were super interested in
| power grids or just super gifted -\\_(tsu)_/-
| tpmx wrote:
| Agreed. I edited my sibling comment. I totally agree that
| electric grids and base loads are pretty complicated
| things. It's just that the base knowledge level is
| infuriatingly low.
|
| I quite often see journalists writing about energy
| politics confusing power and energy.
| tpmx wrote:
| You're not wrong, but I honestly think most don't really
| even understand the difference between power and energy.
| If you don't understand that, trying to explain base load
| is an uphill battle.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Either way, in almost every online discussion I see the
| term base load is used in the wrong context.
|
| Base load exists on the consumer side, as the minimum
| power the grid needs to operate during a cycle of X
| hours/days/weeks/years/whatever. It used to exist on the
| producer side since the cheapest power plants were also
| inflexible regarding ramping their power up and down
| coupled with high fixed costs and low marginal costs.
| Therefore, nuclear and coal was termed as base load
| providers, although it was purely an economical coupling
| leading to a term existing.
|
| Nowadays with renewables undercutting everything they are
| the new base load providers, but it also brings new
| challenges for adapting the grids and consumers to more
| variability in the supply. This is our current world were
| the high fixed, low marginal cost power plant is pushed
| out of the market, as we are currently seeing globally.
| This is unless they can find a way to get their prices
| below renewables, but that is getting more and more
| unlikely with the steam cycle itself soon adding more to
| the KW/h cost than an entire renewable operation.
| oblio wrote:
| Base load exists on the consumer side and unless energy
| storage ramps up 1000-10000x across the world, I don't
| see how solar and wind could ever cover it until then.
| Human power usage patterns don't change that much because
| we don't change much. You need to be able to provide X
| energy at all times, no ifs and buts.
|
| Actually, there is one thing, we need super capable and
| reliable super long distance power grid connections,
| maybe there's some progress on this front?
|
| Because solar and wind absolutely are unreliable on a
| local front.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| With HVDC and UHVDC lines there are progress on the
| transmission front. The main question though is the
| economical race between geographically decoupling your
| renewable power supply versus storage, this is something
| we will see play out in the next 10-15 years.
|
| China recently finished a 3300 km UHVDC line from
| Xinjiang to the east coast with an expected loss of 1.5%
| per 1000 km.
| imtringued wrote:
| Energy storage is not a problem in the long term. Making
| sure that polluting power plants only run 10% of the time
| is a short term problem that has a solution today.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| You could say the same thing about any power source though -
| humans have created way bigger disasters with fossil fuels
| than nuclear power.
|
| > The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy
| germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
|
| How much do those solar panels cost once you factor in
| environmental remediation, EOL recycling, land use, etc.?
| Since that's the standard nuclear is held to, it would be
| good to know.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Sites of nuclear accidents can't be remediated. They're
| essentially lost "forever".
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| This is highly debatable. There are places on Earth with
| natural radiation fields greater than large swaths of the
| evacuation zone around Fukushima. For Chernobyl, see [1].
|
| https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-
| radioactive...
| stale2002 wrote:
| No, thats not true. It is only because people are mis-
| informed on the actual facts and dangers of nuclear
| reactors, that we treat them as if they are lost forever.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I don't think the evidence supports that, and even if it
| did, we create the same dead-zone conditions using
| chemical energy and fertilizers, so I'm not sure why it
| counts against nuclear any more than it would against
| petrochemicals.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Fukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved
| that, again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be
| not neglegible enough.
|
| The Fukushima plant was hit by:
|
| 1) Magnitude 9 (!) earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3)
| Massive fire 4) Total loss of all power to control circuitry.
|
| Even after that, it still didn't kill anybody from
| radioactivity (some firefighters were killed fighting the
| fire, not from radiation).
|
| What do you suppose would happen if a similar series of
| catastrophes struck a hydroelectric dam? Say, the Three
| Gorges Dam in China?
|
| Hint: nothing good.
| pydry wrote:
| Fukushima cleanup costs will be between $470 and $660 billion.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...
|
| US nuclear power gets a liability cap of $0.2 billion. The
| nuclear industry will keep telling us it is safe but it will
| refuse to shoulder the insurance costs beyond a minimal level.
| That's the taxpayer's job and the taxpayer's job alone.
|
| And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive
| than solar and wind.
|
| You could get the price down in a number of ways, but the most
| obvious one is going to be to skimp on safety.
|
| This isn't Germany's fault. Nuclear is only competitive with
| lavish subsidies beyond those it already has. The only
| countries that will really want it are those with nuclear
| weapons and a desire to keep a nuclear industry running to
| maintain skills and technology.
|
| It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with
| decarbonization as an excuse.
| cbmuser wrote:
| > Fukushima cleanup costs will be between $470 and $660
| billion.
|
| Germany's nuclear phase out costs the country $12 billion per
| year plus 1100 additional deaths due to air pollution:
|
| > https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf
|
| > And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more
| expensive than solar and wind.
|
| Except you are comparing levelized costs of electrity with
| the total system costs. Wind and solar need backup and/or
| storage, nuclear doesn't.
|
| > Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond
| those it already has.
|
| Nuclear was *never* subsidized in Germany:
|
| > http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/14/080/1408084.pdf (p.
| 16, answer 27)
|
| > It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with
| decarbonization as an excuse.
|
| It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear weapons
| and which have nuclear power. North Korea has nuclear
| weapons, they don't have nuclear power. South Korea is the
| opposite.
|
| Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards
| nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear
| technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for
| nuclear bombs is made.
|
| Hint: It's not made with BWRs or PWRs, that would be way too
| inefficient and expensive.
| pydry wrote:
| >Nuclear was _never_ subsidized in Germany
|
| When nuclear plants were built in Germany you couldn't get
| green electricity for $33 / MWh.
|
| >It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear
| weapons and which have nuclear power.
|
| This is equally true of everywhere else. It's not about who
| built them 30 years ago. It's about who still wants to
| build them.
|
| >Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards
| nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear
| technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for
| nuclear bombs is made. Hint: It's not made with BWRs or
| PWRs, that would be way too inefficient and expensive.
|
| I didn't say that nuclear plants are being built to create
| plutonium. I said that they were being kept around because
| of the skills and tech - it's a more or less cost-neutral
| way of keeping a ready supply of nuclear engineers and a
| supporting industry.
|
| In the UK it's partly about nuclear submarines, too (which
| are PWRs).
| anoncake wrote:
| > I didn't say that nuclear plants are being built to
| create plutonium. I said that they were being kept around
| because of the skills and tech - it's a more or less
| cost-neutral way of keeping a ready supply of nuclear
| engineers and a supporting industry.
|
| This. Nuclear power doesn't give you nuclear bombs, but
| it does give you the ability to start building them
| within months.
| [deleted]
| lispm wrote:
| > Nuclear was _never_ subsidized in Germany
|
| You don't really believe that, don't you?
|
| > Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards
| nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear
| technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for
| nuclear bombs is made.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progr
| a...
|
| "Japan was reported in 2012 to have 9 tonnes of plutonium
| in Japan, enough for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and
| an additional 35 tonnes stored in Europe.[37][38] It has
| constructed the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which could
| produce further plutonium.[37] Japan has a considerable
| quantity of highly enriched uranium (HEU), supplied by the
| U.S. and UK, for use in its research reactors and fast
| neutron reactor research programs; approximately 1,200 to
| 1,400 kg of HEU as of 2014.[39] Japan also possesses an
| indigenous uranium enrichment plant[32][40] which could
| hypothetically be used to make highly enriched uranium
| suitable for weapons use."
| hanniabu wrote:
| Yup, and everyone says nuclear is safe but that's only
| technologically speaking. The technology is safe, but it's
| the human and regulatory aspect that has glaring red flags...
|
| This first link here makes me absolutely furious. There's too
| much to quote from here, but this succinct excerpt touches on
| loosening safety tests. It goes into more detail in other
| parts of the article. The post has numerous example of very
| concerning issues.
|
| > When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed -- up to 20
| times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused
| radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test
| of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859
|
| > The proposal comes as most of the nation's nuclear power
| plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s,
| are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year
| operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses
| to extend the operating life of their plants past the
| original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging
| plants come with heightened concerns about safety.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-
| inspe...
|
| > The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on
| safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police
| themselves. The NRC "is listening" to this advice, the
| Associated Press reported last month. "Annie Caputo, a former
| nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board
| members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump,
| told an industry meeting this week that she was 'open to
| self-assessments' by nuclear plant operators, who are
| proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of
| some NRC inspections."
|
| https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-
| tru...
| belorn wrote:
| > Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond
| those it already has.
|
| Guess which energy source in France receive most subsidies?
| If the answer was fossil fuels you would be right. If you ask
| Germany with its massive subsidies for renewable, it is
| actually renewable followed by fossil fuels. Then its fossil
| fuels again. The story repeats itself in practically every
| country in EU. Even Sweden with its very public facing pro-
| renewable stance spends millions on subsidizes for fossil
| fuels. In total for 2018, 50 billions euro wast given as
| subsidies for fossil fuels in EU.
|
| Inquisitive people might ask why all those countries are
| spending so much subsidizes on fossil fuels, and the answer
| is pretty simple. Do you want a stable energy grid? You
| either pay the oil, gas and coal companies to keep the
| engines warm in case there is a demand spike, or there won't
| be enough supply when demands go up. Now lets discuss why the
| need to pay for "reserve energy" has spiked in the last few
| decades. It has something to do with intermittent energy
| production.
|
| Here is a suggestion. Lets cut that 50 billions for fossil
| fuel subsidies to 0. Either pay for nuclear/storage or accept
| an unstable grid. I am very tired of oil, coal and gas being
| paid to just keep the engines warm.
| smartties wrote:
| > And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more
| expensive than solar and wind.
|
| Where can I find a source confirming that ?
| pydry wrote:
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-
| energy-...
|
| Wind $26-$54 Nuclear $129-$198
| tpmx wrote:
| Wind power is cheap when it's windy. When it's still the
| cost is $+inf. The grid still needs to maintain it's AC
| frequency.
|
| Wind power producers should be required to buy some kind
| of base load generation credits.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's always windy somewhere. You just need to expand the
| electrical grid.
|
| We are still far from the point where we have enough wind
| that any of it goes unused.
|
| Also what is the cost of storing that energy? It's _so_
| much cheaper to generate it might still come out cheaper.
| tpmx wrote:
| > It's always windy somewhere. You just need to expand
| the electrical grid.
|
| Doubt. Weather systems/patterns are often extremely
| large.
|
| > Also what is the cost of storing that energy?
|
| _Insanely_ high compared to the cost of producing it.
|
| For one common naive case: Storing the energy in Li-Ion
| batteries in e.g. a Tesla Powerwall: $437/kWh.
| zizee wrote:
| > For one common naive case: Storing the energy in Li-Ion
| batteries in e.g. a Tesla Powerwall: $437/kWh.
|
| How did you come up with that number? Total cost of the
| battery divided by its capacity?
|
| Since you do not dispose of the battery upon first
| discharge, the true cost should be amortized across the
| thousands of cycles it would go through during its
| lifetime.
|
| Batteries are still far from economical in many
| situations, but there are many situations where they now
| make sense. They are also getting cheaper all the time,
| and as they do, so will the range of applications
| increase.
| tpmx wrote:
| Oh, you don't understand the difference betweeen power
| and energy...
| alacombe wrote:
| Texas was 5 minutes away from a total grid failsafe
| collapse if the grid frequency had continued to drop, and
| it just happened that pretty much all of North America
| was undergoing high usage. Uncontrolled energy are not
| sustainable at scale.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Storing it is extremely expensive, at least with any
| currently available technology.
|
| This is apparent looking at how much energy prices change
| throughout the day / month based on usage and cost of
| production, and how predictable those changes are.
|
| If storing energy were cost effective you could make a
| killing buying low and selling high on the national grid.
| orangecat wrote:
| _And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive
| than solar and wind._
|
| I'm very suspicious of these claims. First, there's stuff
| like this: https://energycentral.com/c/ec/germany-solar-and-
| wind-triple.... Second, the position of most nuclear
| opponents is not "solar and wind can provide clean energy for
| everyone at a fraction of the cost", but rather "everyone
| needs to radically cut back on energy use and alter their
| lifestyles". I get the same sense as I do from religious
| conservatives who oppose STD vaccines because they allow
| people to continue their sinful ways.
| corty wrote:
| Nuclear costs about the same as wind power and is cheaper
| than solar, all inclusive. Page 71 of https://www.ipcc.ch/s
| ite/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... (pdf is huge).
| simonCGN wrote:
| And yet another of this propaganda pieces. Why so many recently I
| wonder.
| sunkenvicar wrote:
| Nuclear fission produces spent fuel. All the spent fuel a plant
| produces in it's lifetime fits in the parking lot.
|
| But the fuel is not really spent. It contains vast amounts of
| energy that can be extracted at a reprocessing plant.
|
| People who want to landfill spent fuel lack credibility. Perhaps
| they own shares in a uranium mining company?
| natch wrote:
| Let's just ignore the carbon released by cement production.
| hans1729 wrote:
| Lets just ignore the fact that we can't build the required
| storage _period_. The energy comes cheap and clean, until you
| consider the storage and the upkeep of those building for
| milleniums. Then again, who cares about milleniums if Damocles
| climatic sword hovers over our heads today
| Kuinox wrote:
| Yes, cement production for the windmills:
| https://youtu.be/0vE6QkvcV-s?t=13
| jhgb wrote:
| Windmills didn't use cement. I assume they used lime mortar
| like most medieval structures.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Yes my bad, not cement, it's not mortar but concrete,
| 150-300m^3 of concrete per 2MW windmill.
| jhgb wrote:
| Windmills didn't have 2MW power output either.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Did you actually watched the video ?
|
| "Turbines in the 1 to 2 MW range typically use 130 to 240
| m3 of concrete for the foundations".
| https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-
| wind/...
| jhgb wrote:
| You were talking about windmills a moment ago, now you're
| talking about turbines? You're very confusing.
| Kuinox wrote:
| So, you obviously didnt watched the video.
|
| Yes my bad, in my native language windmill and wind
| turbine are the same word.
|
| I was talking about wind turbines, as you can see in the
| video.
| gehsty wrote:
| If you are going to use cement to build anything, a nuclear
| power station is probably the best use for it.
|
| I don't think anyone is ignoring the problem, having huge
| amounts of zero carbon power is the starting point for lots of
| things that will let us solve a lot of the harder problems like
| cement, or jet fuel etc.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Lifecycle emissions of wind, solar, and nuclear are well known
| to be very low carbon. Lifecycle includes the cement used in
| their production [1]. When you're job isn't to turn immense
| flows of carbon + oxygen into CO2 and energy (like fossil and
| biofuel do), it's easy to be low carbon.
|
| [1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-
| low...
| kieranmaine wrote:
| This problem is being worked on. I recently listened to this
| podcast which outlines two approaches to low carbon concrete -
| https://www.npr.org/transcripts/923966126
|
| Take away points:
|
| * The first approach is to use a different mix that can nearly
| half the temperature required to produce the concrete. This can
| reduce the CO2 emissions to produce the concrete by up to 40%
|
| * The second approach uses pure CO2 to cure the concrete which
| locks away more CO2 in the concrete
|
| * The concrete produced by these approaches need to be fully
| tested before the methods can be rolled out and costs reduced
| tpmx wrote:
| In Europe: That cement (which is used to create concrete) is by
| far mostly going into the huge foundations needed for the tens
| (hundreds?) of thousands of 150m+ tall wind power plants that
| only produce power sometimes.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Yes, but compare their CO2 footprints to nuclear. Have you a
| source that shows Nuclear is better? I hunted around a while
| back and got a large range of answers, but nuclear seemed
| consistent worse. Eg see page 29 of this link. https://www.ip
| cc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
| tpmx wrote:
| The error bars make that graph unusable for this purpose.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That's exactly the point I was trying to make - it isn't
| clear that nuclear power has less C02 emissions than wind
| turbines. It's also something that needs a very long view
| to calculate - nuclear waste needs storing and protecting
| and wind turbines aren't being decommissioned all that
| much.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sampo wrote:
| In that figure, if you look at the median (the black line),
| it's quite small.
|
| There is this one very anti-nuclear Stanford professor, who
| has managed to publish some estimates where the carbon
| footprint of nuclear power is way larger than in other
| estimates. These numbers are probably now forever part of
| the literature, and they make the range of published
| numbers quite large in every literature survey.
|
| Sometimes this activist professor also sues people for
| libel, if they publish results disagreeing with his.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson
| tpmx wrote:
| I find ideology-driven scientists to be very dangerous to
| humanity prosperity and progress. Of course he's insanely
| active on Twitter. Last post 8 minutes ago.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Wow. Have you any idea how much his study pushed up the
| mean or got a summary of how his study differed? As you
| say, the estimates vary wildly and I haven't really got
| any idea where his sit relative to others
| tpmx wrote:
| For this thread, your previous comments sadly made my
| post three levels up end up at -2, so all of this is
| kinda hidden. Please post again with this "newfound
| knowledge" in future threads.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| They should invest in thorium research, only then fission would
| become sustainable at human time scale
| s5300 wrote:
| Am I the only person who thinks we're just going to be sending
| nuclear waste into space/storing it on moons with SpaceX
| Starships/whatever comes next?
|
| Can somebody tell me why this won't be a viable option? Seems
| simple enough, and it's not like we've not done worse.
| effie wrote:
| Sending waste to space is a very dumb idea. First, rockets
| explode quite often. Second, sending things to space is very
| expensive, much more than storing them in storage facility.
| Third, nuclear waste will be very valuable in the future, so
| forward thinking country wants to keep it.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| It's both cheaper and more likely to remain isolated from the
| biosphere in stable geologic formations like crystalline
| bedrock than going through the trouble of (relatively
| unreliably) getting into (and out of) orbit.
|
| Current nuclear waste solutions are perfectly sufficient and
| appropriate [1].
|
| [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
| consumer451 wrote:
| My only concerns are the timelines required for nuclear plant
| construction, and also that no one wants one constructed near
| them.
|
| I believe that HVDC conduits going to solar farms in Spain, even
| under the Mediterranean to Africa could be built faster than
| nuclear plants.
|
| I also believe that most people would prefer a compressed gas
| storage system built in a old coal or salt mine built nearby over
| a nuclear plant.
| rando57 wrote:
| I hope that in the future we will seriously consider
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
|
| Compared to current methods of producing nuclear energy, thorium:
|
| - produces significantly more energy per ton
|
| - produces significantly less waste
|
| - the waste is significantly less dangerous (cools down in x00
| years, instead of x0000 years)
| croes wrote:
| We can't even handle a pandemic and you think we can handle
| nuclear energy?
| croes wrote:
| To the down voters, which company or authority do you trust
| enough to operate this systems for decades?
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Have Florida build it.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Nuclear engineer here. I've spent lots of time fighting against
| persistent myths about thorium. All the things you mention are
| characteristics of _breeder reactors_ , not just thorium
| breeders. Uranium-based breeder reactors can do these things as
| well.
|
| Thorium has only one actual physical advantage, and that is
| that it can do breeding with slow neutrons rather than fast
| ones. This is a technicality and has lots of complications.
|
| [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
| nickik wrote:
| Yes, this. I am a huge fan of thorium breeders and there are
| few other minor advantages but people have gone of the deep
| end.
|
| If you are not doing a breeder, uranium is just fine.
| fmajid wrote:
| A big advantage is that thorium is a non-proliferating
| nuclear technology, which may explain why so little effort
| has been put into it.
| tim333 wrote:
| You can still make bombs https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-
| myths.html#myth3
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Yup. This myth is particularly pervasive. Less effort was
| put into thorium because it was inherently more expensive
| to get going and didn't offer sufficient advantages to
| motivate the additional expense.
| max_ wrote:
| You can make your own thorium battery. [0]
|
| [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optoelectric_nuclear_batter
| y
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > A failure of containment would release high-pressure jets
| of finely-divided radioisotopes, forming an effective dirty
| bomb.
|
| I'll let you do that first. Please do it somewhere remote
| kay? :D
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| You're not thinking of a Tritium battery are you?
|
| They produce very little power (W).
| ducleonctor wrote:
| Nuclear power seems incredibly expensive and complicated, even
| more so than large coal power plants. The logistics alone are
| crazy.
|
| Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and
| our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore
| seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem
| like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better
| used to solve rare edge cases like powering infrastructure in
| space and implementing big red buttons for our presidents,
| supreme leaders and chairmen.
|
| Nobody can rule out accidents or malicious things going on with
| the spent fuel anyways.
|
| Wind and solar are very cheap and the sun won't turn off anytime
| soon. Can't we cover the planet's deserts with photovoltaics and
| wind turbines? Couldn't we ship the converted energy using high
| voltage DC lines or hydrogen/methane pipelines?
|
| Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations
| involved who own the biggest deserts?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Sustainability: Nuclear fission fuel on earth can last about 4
| billion years using breeder reactors [1].
|
| Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year,
| compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear
| power.
|
| Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate
| change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets,
| nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds
| in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that
| advantage.
|
| Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV
| causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably
| more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of
| geoengineering impact.
|
| Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical
| danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present
| killer of 8M people per year...
|
| [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-
| is-...
|
| [2] https://thenextweb.com/science/2021/03/02/solar-panels-in-
| th...
|
| [3] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
| ducleonctor wrote:
| > Sustainability: Nuclear fission fuel on earth can last
| about 4 billion years using breeder reactors [1].
|
| Are there safe breeder reactor designs? How to prevent people
| taking some plutonium on the side?
|
| > Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year,
| compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear
| power.
|
| True. But irradiating large patches of land/streams of water
| just makes for bad publicity. Also I do not think that anyone
| seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by
| isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the
| Hanford site or similar sites, like the one near my home town
| Hanau (see comment below).
|
| > Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and
| climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in
| markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern
| nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost
| competitive without that advantage.
|
| South Korea suffers from massive corruption and the country
| is practically run by a few ultra-rich families, even Chinese
| are complaining about that fact. ;)
|
| As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these
| countries, considering their current standard in terms of
| environmental safety and concern for human life versus
| monetary interest of a few? It is no wonder that regulatory
| costs there are lower. A human life is apparently less
| valuable.
|
| > Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with
| solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's
| arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind
| of geoengineering impact.
|
| This is something to consider. Are there positive effects
| too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under
| the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert? Would wind
| turbines reduce peak windspeed and stop or revert
| desertification?
|
| > Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a
| hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3]
| against a present killer of 8M people per year...
|
| If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries"
| that would be awesome. Unfortunately shielding combined with
| the fact that it won't work as a closed system for long (need
| for "refreshing" spent fuel in a breeder periodically) makes
| that impractical due to hard physics. As far as I know.
|
| How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors
| going to be handled? Normal nuclear fuel transport cost lots
| of money and require high security. Are you going to put
| those perfectly safe rods in an Uber? Like that radioactive
| fracking brine on the back of a small truck without
| shielding? That model could work in Russia... or maybe the
| US.
| relax88 wrote:
| The inherent radiation danger seems largely overblown to me.
| Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused any real human
| impact beyond psychological terror, and it was an unsafe design
| with zero safety features. It's design flaws were kept secret
| from the operators, and they were experimenting beyond
| operational parameters in a "hold my beer" fashion. It's like
| looking at Bhopal and saying that pesticide manufacturing isn't
| worth it for humanity because its too dangerous.
|
| The currently identified reserves of Uranium could last us at
| least 200 years, even longer if you enrich it more or use newer
| reactor designs. If you extract it from seawater we've got
| about 60000 years worth
|
| Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on
| the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved
| fusion by the time we run out.
|
| Wind and Solar are indeed cheap, but have higher materials
| throughput than nuclear, and they use orders of magnitude more
| land. This land use will almost certainly have a larger impact
| on the environment than Nuclear. There is also new research
| that is showing wind turbines are a major cause of insect
| decline as well.
|
| The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and
| base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a
| result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They
| can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7.
| So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery
| banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is
| excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these
| battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and
| currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very
| expensive.
|
| Now lets say you've got solar and wind up the wazoo, and
| battery banks to load shift. Can you still power society 24/7?
| Nope. You still need either hydro, natural gas, or nuclear to
| run the grid in a stable and reliable manner. Batteries to
| provide base load overnight would require so much money and
| materials that I don't see this happening any time soon without
| major breakthroughs in battery tech.
|
| What about pumped hydro? Well... turns out dams need to manage
| water levels for practical reasons and while some pumped hydro
| can be useful, the available capacity for this when you take
| into account electricity production and practical water
| management issues is minimal.
|
| Why can't we cover the deserts in solar and wind and transmit
| it? Or move electricity from one area to another when the wind
| isn't blowing or its cloudy? Well transmission is expensive and
| incurs energy loss in a major way. transmission and sub-
| transmission lines today account for about a 30% energy loss.
| Now you're talking about tripling or quadrupling the
| transmission infrastructure at a minimum, and moving energy
| over great distances, which is VERY expensive compared to
| producing it near where it is consumed.
|
| There is a good article here on the technical challenges:
| https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po...
|
| Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too,
| and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of
| conservation.
|
| At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive
| amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of
| safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials
| throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be
| stupid to not use it.
| ducleonctor wrote:
| I grew up in Hanau and was born in that city one year before
| that happened (you may also refer to the sources if you don't
| trust the org publishing the English summary):
|
| https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-
| monitor/493-494/ex...
|
| Children found funny metal pill or drop-like objects in the
| forests around the plant and played with it. While there were
| reports of inspectors and interested civilians being blocked
| from taking measurements.
|
| After this and Chernobyl nobody has a right to complain about
| me being a retarded monkey... or dying maybe 1-5 years
| earlier than normal due to earlier onset of cancer.
|
| Humans can not be trusted (at scale) to keep such material
| secure and even in labs accidents can happen. Same is true
| for large scale use of dangerous chemicals, too.
|
| > Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium
| on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have
| solved fusion by the time we run out.
|
| Are there breeder designs that do not involve molten, highly
| reactive metals?
| deftnerd wrote:
| Nuclear power is expensive and complicated, but not inherently
| so. A lot of the causes of the problem is political decisions
| and bureaucratic processes.
|
| There are many designs for nuclear reactors that are simpler,
| safer, and more suitable for smaller communities, but various
| government nuclear regulation agencies around the world have
| such a high bar for entry that those designs will never be put
| into practice.
|
| In the US, if you want to operate a nuclear reactor, the design
| has to be vetted first. To vet the reactor, you have to
| convince the agency to let you build a full-scale test reactor
| and convince them that the design is likely safe before
| building the test reactor. If anything about the test reactor
| makes them uncomfortable, the design will be denied and the
| reactor won't be allowed to operate and cannot work as a
| template for future reactors.
|
| This creates a very difficult and expensive bar for entry into
| the market. For a large reactor, a company would have to invest
| billions of dollars for a decade before they could even begin
| to hope to operate to pay back the loans, and even then there
| is no guarantee that they'll be allowed to operate the reactor
| to sell the electricity.
|
| That is, unless they use one of the existing pre-approved
| reactor concepts that were designed in the 70's and have known
| flaws (albeit, with known ways to reduce the risks of those
| flaws)
|
| Nuclear radiation might be damaging, but it's not really a big
| deal as long as the design prevents accidents and there are
| safeguards to prevent the uncontrolled release of radiation.
|
| You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a
| LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on
| it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are
| shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.
|
| Solar is an excellent source of energy, with long life spans of
| the equipment but it's only functional for anywhere from 6 to
| 16 hours a day, depending on your latitude and the weather. The
| ideal places for solar farms are often far from the highest
| concentrations of consumers.
|
| Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving
| parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across
| the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to
| just last a decade.
|
| Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing
| predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real
| war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a
| deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause
| problems.
|
| Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are
| improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in
| general.
|
| The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors,
| no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k
| or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.
|
| The problem is that it takes a lot of political will to build a
| nuclear power plant because everyone is afraid of that. Bigger
| plants are often desired because plant owners need to invest
| the decade and tens of millions of dollars getting not just
| approval from the NRC, but approval from the people and
| government within 20 miles of the plant.
|
| Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there
| is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance
| process.
| ducleonctor wrote:
| > You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There
| is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run
| entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years.
| Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more
| supply than demand.
|
| This is interesting. I thought without breeder reactors and
| continued widespread nuclear use we would run out in ~50
| years. Maybe you have more current sources.
|
| > Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the
| moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air
| moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon
| for lifespans to just last a decade.
|
| Yes and I additionally worry about the fiber material being
| slowly rubbed off and being spread downstream by the wind
| (google wind turbine leading edge erosion). Because wind
| turbines on land are often built on farming land. Thus I put
| a lot of hope in improved wind "turbine" designs like:
| https://vortexbladeless.com/technology-design/
|
| > Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are
| improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in
| general.
|
| I thought the US grid is pretty old and some parts (Texas?)
| are on their own. Maybe investments in that area could help,
| in addition to storage (mechanical or hydrogen connected with
| solar).
|
| > Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing
| predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real
| war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of
| a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could
| cause problems.
|
| Combine this statement (risk of "real war") with this
| suggestion...
|
| > The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear
| reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply
| power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of
| urban centers.
|
| ...and you get great savings in making that hated opponents
| main population centers uninhabitable and the irradiated
| ruins a monument to remember. Even if only by unfortunate
| "accident". In WW2 cities were burned down using "firestorm"
| tactics here in Germany. I heard the anniversary bells ring
| an annoyingly long time a few days back in the rebuilt city
| of Wurzburg... why would humanity change character and
| suddenly become more civil in the next conflict?
|
| > Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but
| there is no savings when it comes to that approval and
| acceptance process.
|
| I agree that this is probably due to the hard lessons learned
| from the risks in older experimental and larger commercial
| designs. But are we willing to learn the hard lessons of
| 10000s (or more) of handy, small reactors spread in everyones
| backyard?
|
| Better put some solar panels on some roofs and hydrogen metal
| hydride storage in a few basements. Maybe not under a school
| or kindergarden or the likes.
|
| A grid like this could be made incredibly resilient and hard
| to destroy by any opponent.
| tpmx wrote:
| Meanwhile, in the real world...
| ducleonctor wrote:
| ...Germany gets its natural gas from mother Russia.
|
| Which is more dirty, has a touch of corruption and allows
| mother Russia to tell the Germans how to behave. But it makes
| some politicians and companies in two countries happy and
| shows that large scale energy projects can work if there is a
| will.
|
| So it's a start I guess.
| tpmx wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite:
|
| > Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the
| nations involved who own the biggest deserts?
|
| In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable
| countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure
| the cables going north from Africa. Take the Suez canal
| risk and multiply it with a factor of 100-1000x.
|
| Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing
| Africa...
| ducleonctor wrote:
| > In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable
| countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure
| the cables going north from Africa.
|
| They are indeed unstable - for reasons that may not be
| discussed - but buying the required sites and securing
| them should be possible anyways. If local jobs are
| created in the process, even better. So much effort has
| been wasted on partially securing much more dangerous
| countries like Afghanistan and Irak with questionable
| lasting benefit and apparently low strategic gain.
|
| > Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with 1000.
|
| A very good point. One pipe obviously isn't enough and
| one shouldn't push too large objects through it without a
| capable plumber around.
|
| > Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing
| Africa...
|
| Aren't the Chinese endavours mostly directed at farming
| and some mining for now? OK, they may also try to develop
| some industry, but how well Chinese business culture
| meshes with the African population's culture remains to
| be seen.
|
| Also, just because a competitor is doing something one
| shouldn't do it? If everybody had always followed this
| rule, the USA would now maybe be called "North Mexico"
| because the Spanish sailed some ships there, first. I am
| not saying colonization is a good idea, much better
| arrangements could be made today.
| tpmx wrote:
| I think the you should spend your efforts on responding
| to other comments you got, at least two were quite
| strong, much stronger than mine.
|
| I'll just reply to the China thing:
|
| > Aren't the Chinese endavours mostly directed at farming
| and some mining for now?
|
| No. A large part of their investments are focused is on
| building and owning ports and roads. This is essential
| for owning trade, which is how you get to own the
| governments of Africa.
| thecleaner wrote:
| Oh finally. Hopefully these Greenpeace jackasses dont ruin it
| again.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| They said this to Thatcher back in the 80s didn't they?
| chmod775 wrote:
| There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again.
|
| The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the
| storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries _still_ don 't
| have a long-term solution.
|
| Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists
| merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't
| need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting
| on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily"
| stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues
| with flooding, like Asse II.
| sushisource wrote:
| I just don't really see how this is true. Isn't the basic idea
| to just dig a really deep hole somewhere geologically stable
| and dump it in? My impression isn't that the problem isn't
| solvable, but simply that no one has actually made the
| appropriate investment yet.
|
| That sounds like the same catch-22 as the rest of this. We've
| thrown up our hands and gone "Not worth it" and then our lack
| of investment in proper storage is somehow a blocker.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Research has been ongoing since the 70s to find geologically
| stable underground storage, this is not a solved problem.
| pas wrote:
| No. This is not a real problem. If it were NPPs would not
| store spent fuel on site.
|
| The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the
| simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a
| problem, because there's not that much of it. And while
| it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway.
|
| Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy
| (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the
| later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it
| right (more data, more time spent on finding the right
| solution).
| andbberger wrote:
| Yes it is. You are spreading misinformation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_rep
| o...
| dathinab wrote:
| > geologically stable
|
| Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of
| nuclear wast...
|
| Additionally Politicians mess in seriously bad ways with
| anything related to nuclear.
|
| Like pushing for nuclear power but if it's found that the
| objective best place to store the wast underground is around
| where they live they will try all kind of things to exclude
| the best suited place from the list of potential candidates.
|
| Or adding a unsuited place close to the border of the
| neighbor country they don't like "because of reasons".
|
| Or pushing for nuclear power with arguments like it's
| electricity being very cheap while it's actually the most
| expensive electricity source in their country and that is
| _even through it 's highly subsidized_ (which the much
| cheaper alternatives are not).
|
| Etc. Etc.
|
| I would love I people would start to have a purely objective
| discussion about this.
| rrss wrote:
| > Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale
| of nuclear waste...
|
| it is.
|
| drill a few miles down into the miles-thick crystalline
| salt in the permian basin. it will not go anywhere for
| millions of years.
| dathinab wrote:
| There is no Permian Basin in Germany ...
| yellowapple wrote:
| God forbid Germany exports its nuclear waste.
| rrss wrote:
| There are similar basins in Europe, probably similarly
| suitable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(Europe)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_basin
| corty wrote:
| The IPCC report on climate change mitigation puts nuclear
| median cost on par with wind power (cheaper than offshore,
| slightly more expensive than onshore), cheaper than solar,
| more expensive than hydro. In total, squarely on par with
| the usual suspects for green energy. And they include fuel
| and decommissioning in that cost. See page 71 of https://ww
| w.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
| (caution, huge pdf).
|
| An objective discussion would be nice, but it can only be
| objective if it is based on available facts.
| philipkglass wrote:
| That report is a reasonable snapshot of knowledge at the
| time, but it was published in 2014 and some of the
| underlying data dates back to 2000. You can see the data
| sources that went into the technology-specific metrics in
| Annex II:
|
| https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_
| ar5...
|
| "The data on nuclear power was taken from Lenzen (2008)
| and Warner and Heath (2012)."
|
| "Photovoltaic power: Ranges are based largely on the
| reviews of Hsu et al. (2012) and Kim et al. (2012)."
|
| "Wind power: The data is based on the review of Arvesen
| and Hert-wich (2012) and has been cross-checked with
| Dolan and Heath (2012) and Hertwich et al. (2013)"
|
| Let's go back to the Hsu review cited for photovoltaic
| generation.
|
| "Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Crystalline
| Silicon Photovoltaic Electricity Generation: Systematic
| Review and Harmonization"
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1530-92
| 90....
|
| If you look at tables 1 and 2, it's aggregating studies
| from the years 2000-2009. Most are from 2006 or earlier.
| Solar manufacturing has improved a _lot_ and costs have
| fallen dramatically since 2006. At the same time, nuclear
| projects under development since 2006 in Europe or the
| USA have cost much more than originally planned.
|
| China continues to build new reactors; it's an existence
| proof that new reactors _can_ be built. But China also
| builds wind and solar farms cheaper than Europe or the
| USA. You can 't get a Chinese energy project at Chinese
| domestic prices in either the USA or Europe.
| pas wrote:
| There was a post/thread about this a few weeks/months
| ago. The conclusion is always the same. There is not
| enough plants built to get economies of scale. (Plus
| modular nuclear is the way to go anyway.)
|
| The EU or the US should announce that it's going to order
| 100+ plants. Completely different game. There's no point
| in competing with solar or wind otherwise.
|
| Sure, this is politically untenable. :|
| dathinab wrote:
| hm interesting the numbers are somewhat different then
| what I have seen in other places.
|
| I mean don't get me wrong offshore wind power is always
| expensive but enough sources list solar, on-shore wind
| power as cheaper. Hydro power as comparable and
| Geothermal power as much cheaper.
| corty wrote:
| Problem with most sources is, there are always
| assumptions and caveats: Such as cost-based calculations
| (maybe or maybe not) including teardown and recycling,
| storage cost, capital cost, land cost, etc. Others do
| market-price-based calculations (preferably in those
| markets that prove their point), so you get renewable
| prices from Germany (where renewables are hugely
| subsidized and have to be consumed preferentially) that
| are sometimes even negative, or you get nuclear prices
| from France, where the owner of all nuclear power plants
| is a state owned corp (EDF) that is "rescued" from
| bancruptcy every few years to keep prices down.
|
| I did pick the IPCC reports because those are usually
| regarded as being careful amalgamations of the available
| scientific data. Since there are lots of eyes on those
| reports, larger mistakes should have been pointed out
| already.
|
| But you are right that there is contradictory information
| out there, and I don't really have the perfect
| authoritative source either.
| [deleted]
| chmod775 wrote:
| Your assumption is that every country is guaranteed to have
| access to underground places that are "geologically stable"
| over the required time-period, aren't aquifers, or at risk
| letting water in by some other means.
|
| The assumption is simply wrong.
| sushisource wrote:
| How is that the assumption? There only needs to be one such
| place on the whole planet (or, shit, shoot it into space).
| I'm not saying it's _easy_ (in fact, that was kinda my
| point), but it 's absolutely _possible_ and I didn 't
| assume anything about individual groups needing their own
| storage.
| loeg wrote:
| You could throw it in the fucking ocean and it would be
| better than coal plants, and arguably better than natural
| gas.
| vidarh wrote:
| You could grind it up and intentionally pump it into the
| air, and it _still_ would likely kill a tiny portion of
| the number of people killed by coal plants.
|
| I mean a whole lot of coal plants _do_ pump uranium dust
| into the air. If you did it with the nuclear waste you 'd
| pump worse isotopes into the air, but the volume would be
| tiny.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Hell, I'd bet you could mix it into soft drinks and sell
| it as "Nuka Cola Quantum" and it'd still be significantly
| less deadly than coal.
| Lammy wrote:
| I think the standard response is "but what about a
| hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough
| from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and
| dig it up thinking it's holy or whatever" and a link to the
| spiky ground and "this is not a place of honor". Assuming a
| future civilization gets to exist considering we keep burning
| petroleum products and calling them clean while we waste time
| arguing about tech that's been proven for fifty years because
| the right groups of people can't own it.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > I think the standard response is "but what about a
| hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected
| enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find
| it and dig it up thinking it's holy or whatever"
|
| It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this
| discussion?
|
| The response is that countries like Germany have already
| spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and
| haven't found one. At this point it seems likely there _isn
| 't_ one.
|
| If a place is found, by all means, go build nuclear
| reactors. But sort the waste problem out _first_. We 've
| already done the "build first, figure the waste problem out
| later". Many decades later, here we are.
| vidarh wrote:
| The problem is that in the meantime the alternatives that
| are actually being used are killing thousands of people a
| year _right now_.
| lispm wrote:
| Nuclear is not an alternative. It has a lot of unwanted
| side effects and it just does not scale to solve the
| problem. It's extremely costly, comes with costly
| unsolved problems and is slow to build up.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > It has a lot of unwanted side effects
|
| So does literally every other power source. Nuclear is,
| if anything, among the least bad options in this regard.
|
| > and it just does not scale to solve the problem.
|
| It absolutely does, _if_ we 're willing to actually try.
|
| Evidently, we'd rather just keep killing ourselves with
| coal.
| lispm wrote:
| > It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try.
|
| We are trying that since 66 years, since the first
| nuclear power plant.
|
| What we have achieved so far is a nuclear industry which
| is hardly able to keep the status quo of installed power
| generation, sky high rising costs for building nuclear
| power plants, extremely long build times, very little
| technological progress in the last decade, unsolved
| financial and technological problems, ...
|
| If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would
| thrive by now.
|
| All the promised next-gen problem solvers like breeders,
| thorium fuel cycle, reprocessing industries, ... have
| been more costly and financially toxic.
| vidarh wrote:
| Not shutting down plants _is_ an alternative to instead
| slowing down phasing out coal, like Germany did.
|
| And almost all of the alternatives have costly problems
| too, like causing more deaths for most of them.
|
| Large scale solar _might_ be less lethal, but pretty much
| every other power source causes more short term deaths.
|
| I'm not arguing against renewables. I'm arguing that this
| fear of nuclear costs huge numbers of lives by extending
| the lifetime of e.g. hydro and fossil fuel plants, all of
| which are far more dangerous.
|
| The fear mongering over nuclear has killed more people
| than nuclear ever has.
| lispm wrote:
| > Not shutting down plants is an alternative to instead
| slowing down phasing out coal, like Germany did.
|
| Germany accelerated the development of renewable energy.
| That was the goal. Nuclear had to go first. Coal is
| following. The Germany time scale to rebuild its
| electricity landscape goes over many decades.
|
| By investing many many billions into renewables, instead
| of investing them into nuclear, Germany helped to
| kickstart the renewable energy industry, which will over
| a long period of time be much more successful replacing
| fossil fuels, than nuclear ever did or will do.
|
| Just building a nuclear power plant here and there will
| not solve the CO2 problem. Scaling renewable to make it
| cheap and able for large scale distributed deployment is
| the way forward.
| Lammy wrote:
| The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb
| this place physically. This place is best shunned and
| left uninhabited.
| exar0815 wrote:
| This is not true. The most sensible place was
| intentionally overlooked because one of germanys larges
| political parties (CSU) has all her voters there, and the
| next best place (Gorleben) was politically and
| ideologically fought over for decades until we gave up
| and said fuck you and everyone, lets just store it where
| it stands.
| logifail wrote:
| > most sensible place
|
| Can you define who gets to decide whether a place is
| "most sensible"?
|
| Subject-matter experts? National politicians? Regional
| politicians?
|
| Or maybe it's more like: voters (nationally)? voters
| (regionally)? voters (locally)?
| [deleted]
| j-pb wrote:
| The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable
| now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000
| years.
|
| And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization
| accidentally diggs is up.
|
| And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the
| wrong hands.
|
| Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long
| term nuclest storage facilities?
|
| East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german
| border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right
| next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the
| east german border.
|
| Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for
| careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.
|
| So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst
| thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
| sobellian wrote:
| If World Wars 3, 4, and 5 all occur then I think we can
| safely say the global population has already been
| thoroughly irradiated.
| kmonsen wrote:
| Yeah, if the dangerous scenario is what if ww3 happens,
| wipes out all human knowledge, civilization is rebuilt
| and accidentally digs a kilometer down and finds some
| nuclear waste then I mean the whole ww3 is probably a
| bigger deal.
|
| Also continents can moving in 800.00 years, sure but we
| can also move the nuclear deposits. It's not like they
| have to stay in that exact spot for all eternity.
|
| Nuclear is all about buying humanity time to solve the
| energy problems. I think we might need that time to get
| to full renewables, if we ever get there.
| spideymans wrote:
| >And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization
| accidentally diggs is up.
|
| This is premised on the idea that some future civilization
| would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote
| location and just _happen_ to come across some nuclear
| waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small
| house. It 's also presumes that future civilizations will
| have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear
| fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it.
|
| This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced
| with the threat of apocalyptic climate change _today_ ,
| it's a risk I'm willing to take.
| pizzapill wrote:
| We are talking about time frames that are many times
| longer than the existence of modern humans as a species.
| We have absolute zero clue what most humans did 200k
| years ago, we have only little knowledge what humans did
| 4000 years ago. How can you expect us to communicate with
| a world in eight hundred thousand years, or 1.6 million
| years? We don't even manage to get any of the nuclear
| waste out of our oceans we put there 40 years ago.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What are the odds of having large chunks of learned
| knowledge wiped out at this point? When the Romans did
| it, few could read/write and few people had access to the
| stored information of the day. That made it very easy to
| sequester knowledge. At this point in time, other than
| ELE type of events, can knowledge be kept away from all
| of humanity now? Sure, dictators can make it hard for the
| parts they control, but the rest of the world keeps on
| learning.
| pizzapill wrote:
| There is zero chance that we can communicate anything at
| those timespans. As I already wrote we have trouble to
| tell what happened 4000 years ago (how were the Pyramids
| build exactly?) and that is just a blink of an eye when
| compared to a million years.
|
| Ancient Egypt was a super advanced civilization
| continuously existing for 4000 years! Yet shortly after
| the decline nobody could read Hieroglyphs anymore.
|
| We don't know what the future holds. Lets say in 50 years
| a low intensity Gamma Ray Burst hits earth and destroys
| all digital information but fries only half of all living
| creatures. The survivors dig trough the trash of the past
| to get to the rare earth metals they need to rebuild
| their civilization and find this really neat bunker with
| those funny signs...
| dencodev wrote:
| To dig through the materials these bunkers are made of
| would require technology advanced enough they would know
| what radiation is and how to detect it.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > We are talking about time frames that are many times
| longer than the existence of modern humans as a species.
|
| No, we absolutely are not.
|
| "Long half-life" = "less radioactive". By definition.
|
| Do you know what the half life of CO2 is? Infinity.
| pizzapill wrote:
| The half life of Plutonium is ~24k years. That's way
| beyond a time frame we have any grip on. Then its still
| very, very dangerous. Uranium (nuclear fuel) has a half
| life of 200k - 4.4 million years. Then its half as
| dangerous.
|
| CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.
| pas wrote:
| Why does it matter if some hypothetical future
| civilization cannot understand it though? If humanity as
| we know it is gone then compared to that some random
| future bad mining accident seems silly to worry about.
| pizzapill wrote:
| Sure but there are other dangers, some of this stuff has
| to be cooled. It has to be guarded. The place to store it
| has to be secure from all kinds of influences we can't
| control etc. To cite wikipedia:
|
| > However, even a storage space hundreds of meters below
| the ground might not be able to withstand the pressures
| of one or more future glaciations with thick sheets of
| ice resting on top of the rock, deforming it and creating
| internal strains.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
|
| We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard
| of long term storage, because the timespans involved and
| the potential dangers are not manageable by humans atm.
|
| The question is do we want to put more on the pile or
| not? If the alternative is to destroy our planets with
| coal and co the answer should be clear.
|
| But take Germany for example. We've built up wind energy
| from 0 to more output than nuclear energy in 15 years. I
| think this is preferable to nuclear energy which is not
| that dangerous but has the potential to become a
| unmanageable catastrophe at some point.
|
| When we look at global warming there are two nations that
| need to act. China and the US, producing around 50% of
| Green House Gases. Both have more wind, way more space
| and potentially more money than Germany (China announced
| last year that they are gonna spend 1.5 Trillion USD in
| the next decades to become greener).
| cbmuser wrote:
| > The issue is not finding a place that's geologically
| stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in
| 850.000 years.
|
| Something that takes several hundred thousand years for
| decay isn't actually dangerous.
|
| Short half-life: High radioactivity.
|
| Long half-life: Low radioactivity.
|
| Furthermore, spent nuclear fuel can be recycled up to 95%:
|
| > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-
| spent-...
|
| > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE
|
| > https://www.rosatom.ru/en/press-centre/news/the-first-
| serial...
|
| > East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west
| german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs
| right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to
| the east german border.
|
| East Germany never put any spent fuel into their own soil.
| They sent the spent fuel back to the USSR. Spent fuel is a
| resource with a market value. The GDR and the USSR didn't
| just threw that away.
|
| > Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for
| careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.
|
| It's actually pretty safe and has among the lowest numbers
| of deaths per TWh:
|
| > https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| > So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the
| worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a
| PV cell.
|
| Actually, the worst thing is that it causes Germany to
| build new gas power plants and stop shutting down coal
| plants:
|
| > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_und_im_Bau_
| bef...
|
| > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Nord_Stream_2
|
| > https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Elektrizi
| tae...
|
| > https://www.wa.de/hamm/kraftwerk-westfalen-in-hamm-
| uentrop-i...
|
| > https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.grosskraftwerk-
| man...
|
| > https://www.stuttgarter-
| zeitung.de/inhalt.energieversorgung-...
|
| > https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-
| kohleausstieg-...
|
| > https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/datteln-vier-
| geht...
|
| Compare Germany's and France's emissions in the energy
| sector:
|
| > https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-
| sector?t...
|
| > https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-
| sector?t...
|
| Germany emits SEVEN(!) times as much as the French for
| producing electricity and heat. The nuclear phase out is
| causing 1100 premature death every year in Germany and
| causes additional costs of $12 billion per year:
|
| > https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf
|
| And Germany has the highest electricity prices - worldwide:
|
| > https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
|
| Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths during the
| Texas blizzard because they couldn't provide enough
| electricity during the cold.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths during
| the Texas blizzard because they couldn't provide enough
| electricity during the cold.
|
| Please, quit spreading this false/fake BS information.
| This is not what happened in Texas. You're willing to do
| the research on the support of your point of nuclear
| saftey, but then you got very lazy with this statement
| and did not research this clickbait level comment.
| rhodozelia wrote:
| It is unfortunate you included the last paragraph in your
| comment as the rest of the comment seemed legitimate, but
| the issue in Texas had nothing to do with renewables,
| they were not scheduled to meet much of the system demand
| and the cause of the outage was numerous other plants not
| able to run due to the cold.
|
| Including the last paragraph brings all the other points
| in to doubt, even though I otherwise agree with those
| points
| j-pb wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_was
| te_... Yeah because only fuel is highly radioactive...
|
| Texas failed to secure their electrical grid, that has
| nothing to do with renewables. We got renewables running
| in far worse weather conditions.
|
| Capitalism and greed killed those texans.
|
| You're making my case that people can't be trusted with
| nuclear, even though the tech in and of itself could be
| safe.
| vidarh wrote:
| Renewables also cost numerous deaths for other reasons.
|
| Hydro is the cause of the _by far_ most lethal single
| power plant related failure (the Banqiao dam failures).
|
| Rooftop solar causes more deaths per unit of electricity
| delivered from _installation related accidents alone_ to
| be uncompetitive with nuclear.
|
| Generally the more construction that is needed for a
| given production method, the more deaths, and that tends
| to go in the favour of nuclear given the sheer amount of
| power generated once a plant is operational.
|
| Large solar installations _may_ win out over nuclear in
| terms of safety, but it 's hard to get good data.
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| Ok, i'll bite. You know nothing about the operational
| details of power grid infrastructure in Texas and what
| lead to the problems encountered.
|
| Here is a good video explaining what happened:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM
|
| Just FYI, Grady from Practical Engineering channel who
| made the video is a civil engineer. I also recommend his
| entire series about power grid (well, actually all his
| videos are great). )
| rrss wrote:
| How is that video inconsistent with j-pb's comment?
|
| The video describes what happened, and summarizes the
| cause as:
|
| > Basically, the entire system was ill-prepared for a
| storm of this magnitude.
|
| The video addresses only what happened, and
| (intentionally) does not address why it happened - why
| the system was ill-prepared. but it's absolutely true
| that there are "renewables running in far worse weather
| conditions" (and natural gas). all of these systems can
| be winterized.
|
| j-pb thinks that the system was unprepared due to
| "capitalism and greed," which IMO is not an unreasonable
| idea. Why do you think the various Texas organizations
| basically ignored the FERC/NERC recommendations for cold
| weather preparedness from 2011?
| xupybd wrote:
| If Capitalism and greed failed here wait 'till you see
| what centralised control of an economy can do. Free actor
| based economies need some regulation and fail pretty
| spectacularly at times. Centralised economies however,
| they cause death and destruction at a level only war and
| plague can rival. The problem is, greed drives people in
| both systems.
| logifail wrote:
| > Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths [...]
|
| Question: in which sectors do we currently optimise for
| minimum deaths (above anything else)?
| Cerium wrote:
| In general, automation that reduces human control - self
| driving cars and amusement park rides.
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| Uhm, healthcare?
| isodev wrote:
| The challenge with nuclear waste is that you can't just throw
| money at it and expect it to work. Radioactivity and chemical
| toxicity persists for hundreds and thousands of years. What
| is needed to design, build and maintain such sites is beyond
| "extreme engineering" and also very expensive.
|
| Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear
| waste into space.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the
| nuclear waste into space."
|
| Please no. A launch failure with several tons of
| radioactive dirt as a payload is about as bad as it gets.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long term?
| Here is a map of seismic areas worldwide
|
| https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-
| world-1...
|
| Are there other instabilities to take into account? Finally
| there is also a question as to the political viability of
| burying waste at a particular location.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long
| term?
|
| Well, I mean, a lot of the planetary and moon surfaces in
| thr solar system, compared to Earth. But shipping costs are
| high.
| andbberger wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_rep
| o...
| godelski wrote:
| It also is an issue we have a lot of time to solve. It isn't
| like humans are going anywhere soon. It also isn't like
| there's that much waste. Honestly it probably won't happen
| until there is enough waste that local storage becomes a
| problem. Which at this rate would take a few hundred more
| years.
| hu3 wrote:
| Until then we can figure out a solution. Something that
| seems crazy now will be trivial by then. For example an
| electromagnetic cannon to shoot waste into outer space [1].
|
| [1] I just Googled and of course there's a Wikipedia page
| for that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth
| andbberger wrote:
| Your impressions have no basis in fact.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo.
| ..
| cinntaile wrote:
| It would be interesting to see some examples of EU countries
| that have solved the long-term storage problem? All I know of
| are countries that have been researching underground tunnels
| since the 70s and they're still not in production use.
| jsnell wrote:
| Finland's long term storage is expected to be operational in
| a couple of years:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo.
| ..
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Sweden is nearly done with the environmental review of final
| storage of spent nuclear fuel. There is still scientific
| discussion regarding if the containers will last and remain
| intact for the 10 000 year goal. They hope to have a facility
| ready by 2030.
|
| https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-
| repositor...
| noinsight wrote:
| Finland.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo.
| ..
| StreamBright wrote:
| >> The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been
| the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still
| don't have a long-term solution.
|
| Sold problem for decades. This is an economical question. Can
| we store nuclear waste in reliable manner for a long time that
| we can afford when operating a nuclear power plant.
|
| Yes we can. Case closed.
| Kuinox wrote:
| This is not "temporarly":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
| nickik wrote:
| I still don't understand why nuclear waste needs long terms
| storage. With Burner reactors you can produce waste that only
| needs storage for 100s of years, not 1000s.
|
| Its easy to store and manage, basically it can just stand in a
| field, doing nothing for 100 years.
|
| The 'waste' is not waste, its material we might want to use in
| the future and putting it into some 10000 years storage is
| idiotic.
| Angostura wrote:
| I absolutely agree that we don't have a long term solution for
| storing nuclear waste.
|
| The thing is, we don't have a long term solution for storing
| CO2 either.
|
| The thing I _like_ about nuclear waste is is it 's obvious, its
| tangle and it sits around in sinister looking containers.
|
| As opposed to CO2.
| kaibee wrote:
| We don't have short term solutions for storing CO2 either.
| anonporridge wrote:
| The fact that this simple line of reasoning seems to be
| completely missing from the minds of anti nuclear activists
| is...perplexing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| At the same time it's not. Big scary looking symbols
| plastered over everything compared to just filling the air
| making it out of sight out of mind. Once that's achieved,
| the mass populace doesn't care. Try to build a facility
| with those scary symbols that are visible anytime one
| chooses to look, and people get all NIMBY very quickly.
| pas wrote:
| The solution seems obvious. Set up a town of nuclear
| power activists. YIMBY.
| pyrale wrote:
| > There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments
| again.
|
| The thing is, these are not just straw men, but talking points
| frequently used by nuclear energy opponents. Along with others,
| like asserting that nuclear energy is a source of CO2, etc.
|
| If nuclear proponents had to focus only on reasonable, grounded
| talking points, they would probably be happier for it.
|
| > for which many countries still don't have a long-term
| solution.
|
| It's an OK point, and it's a shame that Germany seems to skip
| its environmental responsibilities. However, EU laws apply to
| all EU countries, including the ones that do a better job.
| jackweirdy wrote:
| Lunar orbit
| Rule35 wrote:
| That's not a technical problem, but a political one. Imagine if
| I said "yeah, solar sucks because people burn down the solar
| farms" and then you saw me sneaking away with a can of gas...
|
| Deep geological storage, but _not_ in salt beds, is a simple
| answer. And not entombed, etc. Just sitting on skids. Waiting
| to be inspected and repaired. I 've been in deep hard-rock
| mines that individually would hold the entire world's waste.
|
| The true answer though is breeder reactors and using 99% of the
| fuel, not 3%, and the waste being shorter-term byproducts as
| well.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Find a mountain and shove it in there. Doesn't have to be that
| hard.
| Slikey wrote:
| Given that mountains are a result of geological activity,
| this is for sure the worst place to store it. You'll have a
| better chance digging out a big hole in the desert - which
| the EU doesn't have.
| drran wrote:
| Yeah, we can send all our nuclear waste to Afghanistan. They
| will find a place to store it.
| cbmuser wrote:
| > The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been
| the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still
| don't have a long-term solution.
|
| Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's actually the best type of
| waste that exists. It's extremely dense, is solid and any
| leakage can easily detected.
|
| And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled:
|
| > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-
| spent-...
|
| > Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition
| exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so
| they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany
| are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just
| "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which
| already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
|
| Asse isn't a storage for high-level waste. It contain low-level
| waste that can also come from hospitals and such. Germany has
| no storage for high-level waste yet.
|
| Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in
| Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste:
|
| > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
|
| Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level
| nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall.
|
| Just look at this photograph, it shows _all_ of the French
| nuclear waste accumulated in decades:
|
| > https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
|
| Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It never was.
| godelski wrote:
| A bigger factor to note is that 95% of radiation is contained
| within 1% of the waste. I think the problem here is that
| people don't realize how small this number is. Because
| 11ktons sounds like a lot. But if you compare it to any other
| waste in the world it is tiny. Perspective is lost.
|
| I also don't understand why not having a geological
| repository is an issue. Many researchers propose just storing
| it in place after decommissioning. You have a lot of
| shielding material (i.e. the other 99% of reactor waste that
| is mostly concrete) to protect a very small amount of
| radiation and keep the material distributed, which has some
| security benefits. Not having a centralized location doesn't
| seem like an issue. It isn't like humans are going anywhere
| anytime soon and we're going to lose information about where
| waste is stored. We have plenty of time to figure out a long
| term storage system that is still safe if the entirety of
| human information is lost. It's a great goal, but if that's
| our concern we should talk about deep geological repositories
| for a lot of other waste that we have that doesn't degrade
| overtime.
| patall wrote:
| Call me irrational but storing small amounts of highly
| radio active material in many locations is, from my point
| of view, basically asking for a dirty bomb to happen at
| some point. It only needs an event like the end of the
| soviet union to happen in a single country on earth and any
| terrorist organization would be able to buy enough of it. I
| acknowledge that this may happen anyways with the current
| situation but your scenario makes it even more likely.
| loeg wrote:
| Coal plants are like aerosolized dirty bombs operating
| 24/7, so the trade-off is still good even with that
| (irrational, IMO, but for the sake of argument let's
| consider it probable) factor.
| godelski wrote:
| Dirty bombs aren't an issue. You might want to ask
| yourself why we've never seen one used, especially if you
| understand how easy it is to obtain the necessary
| materials. IIRC we've only caught a handful of devices
| (none exploded). Also we have to consider when it
| explodes, it just doesn't make enough radiation. It is
| pretty difficult to generate enough radiation that would
| actually cause an increase in cancer rates (bombs
| disperse the radiation quickly, though it does aerosolize
| it). And then that cancer hits in 20+ years. It just
| isn't an effective weapon. Sure, it makes for a scary
| pipe bomb, but at the end of the day it is far more
| dangerous for the maker and greatly increases the
| complexity of the terrorist attack (also greatly
| increasing the likelihood that you get caught before you
| can deploy).
|
| So a terrorist just gets a slight increase in fear
| factor, but it doesn't increase deadliness of the weapon,
| requires a lot more work, greatly increases the chance
| that they get caught, puts them in more danger, and so
| they just don't do it. There's too many downsides for
| only a minor upside. Why do it when you could just make a
| dozen pipe bombs and put them in trash cans around the
| city?
|
| Really just think if you were a terrorist and wanted to
| do damage. There's a lot of things you could do (bunch of
| rusty nails on the I-5) that just don't happen. They are
| easy to accomplish, can do a lot of damage, but just
| don't. Why? Different objectives and just terrorism is
| extremely rare in the first place. And I'm pretty sure a
| drilling through feet of concrete and metal in a likely
| highly monitored site is too big of a hurdle when you can
| just go to home depot and get some stump remover and some
| steel pipes.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| To add onto this, widespread and cheap is way more
| effective at generating terror.
|
| The current trend in Kabul are bombs that get stuck onto
| vehicles by passing motorcyclists using magnets. It's
| quite terrifying, since the ease essentially allows
| terrorists to enact a widespread campaign against civil
| service and civil society. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/1
| 2/16/world/asia/afghanistan-ma...
| godelski wrote:
| Exactly, terror is based on perpetuating the idea that
| anyone could be the victim of a terrorist attack. That
| they are simple and easy to do so the FBI/CIA has no
| chance of catching these "rogue" actors. Dirty bombs just
| don't fit into a typical terrorist's prerogative. Dirty
| bombs aren't cheap and can't be made by anyone. It takes
| a lot of time to collect the materials in a way that
| isn't immediately noticed.
| arichard123 wrote:
| Yes, the time that a dirty bomb is most dangerous is
| before it goes off
| csunbird wrote:
| Terrorists are not known to be the most logical people,
| to be honest. They are going to try anything that can
| generate terror in large scale and a dirty bomb is a
| very, very terrorizing thing to general population.
|
| General population thinks anything with radiation is
| panic worthy, even though there isn't that big of a deal.
| alacombe wrote:
| > Terrorists are not known to be the most logical people,
| to be honest
|
| Terrorists want blood and guts on national TV, not a
| statistical raise in cancer over 30 years.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Look around you at the world stricken by pandemic. What
| self respecting terrorist isn't pivoting to bioweapons
| now instead of keeping Black Sunday or The Sum of All
| Fears on loop in the headquarters (for the life of me I
| can't remember the name of the Tom Clancy book where Iran
| weaponizes Ebola)
| gryn wrote:
| > What self respecting terrorist isn't pivoting to
| bioweapons
|
| for some reason I find it funny to imagine a terrorist
| pondering about his long term career plans and prospects.
|
| do they also have stuff like resume driven development?
|
| the terrorist might find some operation ridiculous but
| does it anyway to make his resume better, that way he can
| get hired into the FAANGs of the terrorism sector.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| > They are going to try anything that can generate terror
| in large scale
|
| Sounds they better write blog posts about google and
| facebook tracking
| godelski wrote:
| You don't have to be pretty smart to realize that it's a
| hell of a lot more expensive and requires a significant
| amount more work to create a dirty bomb vs a conventional
| bomb. Or rather you don't have to have any intelligence
| because both those things are _physical_ limits.
| webreac wrote:
| The "highly radio active" material that is dispersed is
| mainly radioactive by contamination and unsuitable for
| any bomb. In La Hague, uranium and plutonium are
| recycled. The part that could be used for a dirty bomb
| (other fission products) does not leave La Hague. It is
| called "glass storage" if you do a google search. This
| storage is the origin of the old logo of cogema.
| belorn wrote:
| Pulverised fuel ash seems a much more effective component
| for a dirty bomb. It mixes good with air, is much more
| harmful to humans both long term and short term, is also
| very radiactive, and mixes well with fresh water
| supplies. It also much easier to find and is likely much
| less guarded, and if stolen less likely to be tracked.
|
| The only reason I can see why no one has used that
| already is that chemical weapons designed for the purpose
| are more effective.
| godelski wrote:
| Those chemical weapons are cheaper, easier to obtain
| (literally a grocery store), easier to produce, easier to
| obtain higher yields, etc. They also are extremely
| terrifying.
|
| But even chemical weapons aren't used that often. We
| rarely hear about anthrax letters and we never hear about
| terrorist attacks that used bleach and ammonium even
| though practically everyone knows about this reaction and
| the materials are cheap, easy to obtain, and don't raise
| suspicion. (Side note: we do hear about people
| accidentally creating this mixture fairly frequently.
| Enough that almost everyone knows someone that did it)
|
| Chemical/biological/nuclear weapons are just not worth it
| to terrorists. If they were we'd have seen them and if
| we're being honest the dirty bomb is the hardest out of
| all of them.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes it's a lot less waste, but most waste isn't
| radioactive!!
| godelski wrote:
| It also just isn't a lot of waste. It sounds like a lot,
| but consider that the US produces 100 _million_ tons of
| coal waste per year (2014). Hell, solar has ~30ktons of
| waste a year (just PV panels). 11ktons over 60 years just
| is astronomically tiny. That 's 138 tons a year, 150x
| less than solar and 500000x less than coal. They just
| don't compare.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I didn't say it was a lot of waste?
| consp wrote:
| That coal waste is also radioactive. Natural, but still
| radioactive.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| "Natural" as opposed to? :)
| godelski wrote:
| Plutonium is not a naturally occurring element. Plenty of
| stuff is man made.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Natural as in naturally occurring. Coal is formed and
| burns in nature with no interaction from humans.
| Plutonium does not occur naturally in detectable
| quantities. It only does so through human action.
| alexott wrote:
| Depending on location, it could be very radioactive... I
| studied and worked at lab that did measurements, and it
| was push for closing a nuclear plant in our city (in
| Siberia) for coal-based plant, but after evaluation of
| waste, it was decided to continue to use nuclear-based
| station.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The US produces less coal waste every year, heading
| rapidly toward zero as the cost of coal power
| increasingly exceeds that of other sources.
| ben_w wrote:
| Ironically, most waste _is_ radioactive. Obviously not
| _as_ radioactive or we wouldn't be having this
| discussion, but turns out almost everything is at least a
| bit.
| whatever1 wrote:
| All plastics can be recycled. Does not mean they do.
|
| In fact, we have unmitigated leaking dumps here in the US,
| but since it is not in your backyard you don't care. Not your
| problem, someone elses problem.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#:~:text=The%20Han.
| ...
|
| I can play the environmentalist on the backs of other people
| as well. Super easy.
| dtech wrote:
| Most plastics are very hard if not impossible to recycle.
| Especially when different plastics are mixed or a product
| is made of multiple materials, i.e. nearly all products.
| whatever1 wrote:
| All plastics can be recycled. Is it economical? No. Same
| goes for nuclear waste.
| godelski wrote:
| Most plastics aren't actually recyclable, which is why they
| aren't recycled. But we say that we can because it shifts
| the burden. Companies like Coke have been saying that
| they'll have 50% recycled material in the next 20 years for
| the last 60. ~~Fusion~~Full recycled product chain is only
| 20 years away!
|
| Also, 17% of France's energy comes from _recycled_ nuclear
| (70% from nuclear)[0]
|
| [0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/country-pr...
| makomk wrote:
| The big problem with recycling spent nuclear fuel is that the
| required reprocessing is much worse in terms of safety than
| the nuclear power plants themselves. Lots of lovely, toxic,
| highly radioactive solutions which are practically _iching_
| to go prompt critical and ruin everyone 's day. I think the
| only reprocessing program which managed not to be a safety
| train wreck is France's, and I half-suspect they might have
| just been better at covering up because it's so unusual (and
| in keeping with other aspects of their nuclear program).
| cbmuser wrote:
| The French have been doing it for decades already with not
| a single casualty:
|
| > https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-
| exploratio...
|
| It's not that they are doing the recycling in a cookie
| factory.
| Klinky wrote:
| La Hague dumps radioactive waste liquids into the North
| Sea. Reactors currently cannot run 100% on MOX.
| Separation of Plutonium in the recycling process has
| proliferation concerns. Other countries have found
| building similar recycling plants challenging due to
| cost, with DoE estimating $50+ billion. La Hague was
| initially designed to extract Plutonium for weapons use,
| which likely justified its costs at the time.
|
| The Marcoule site where MOX fuel is manufactured had an
| explosion in 2011, which did result in a fatality.
| webreac wrote:
| La Hague used to dump small quantities of radioactive
| liquid (mainly water used to clean barrels that contained
| weakly radioactiv waste) in Nort Sea. When I left (in
| 1999), the project to completely stop this dump was well
| advanced. The idea was to vaporized the water and collect
| the remains in a barrel.
|
| You are right that we have a lot of plutonium that we can
| not use. The intent of superphenix was to use this
| plutonium. It failed.
| pyrale wrote:
| > La Hague dumps radioactive waste liquids into the North
| Sea.
|
| That would be a long pipeline, because La Hague is facing
| the channel, not the north sea.
| nickik wrote:
| There are many ways to do recycling and we have 100s of
| years to figure it out. What we do now is doable, but its
| the worst possible thing.
|
| Other forms of recycling are very viable and have much less
| problems and much less side streams.
|
| The problem is of course that anti-nuclear crowed have
| stopped practically all technology development so they can
| claim all problems are solvable and nuclear should be
| abolished.
|
| As everything with nuclear, we as a society barley got to
| first generation technology and then halted all
| development.
|
| Canada is doing some create work with recycling of CANDU
| fuel, Moltex Energy is in development of a reactor to use
| that fuel and its a much better process then what the
| french use.
| StreamBright wrote:
| >> iching to go prompt critical
|
| Are you kidding? What kind of nuclear waste has even the
| remote possibility to go critical that is produced by a
| VVER reactor that is pretty common?
| random_kris wrote:
| Yeah but i can imagine as we scale the hall like that will
| soon be able to contain only 10 years worth of material. Then
| 1 year etc...
| loeg wrote:
| Scale what? France already generates all of its own power
| requirements and is a net exporter of electricity. They're
| at 100% scale already.
| cbmuser wrote:
| That single hall is for the _whole_ country for _decades_.
|
| Nuclear is the _only_ technology where the fuel and the
| waste for decades can be stored on-site. It's just
| extremely dense.
|
| The Russians have a single hall for all their waste plus
| the waste of other countries such as Bulgaria or Ukraine:
|
| > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s
|
| The US even had a nuclear power plant with full fuel
| reprocessing on site:
|
| > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU
| laurent92 wrote:
| Just for everyone to have a picture, uranium doesn't take
| much room because it is quite heavy: 19.1g/cm3, denser
| than lead (11.3) but slightly less than gold (19.3) and
| plutonium (19.8).
| fastball wrote:
| The density of uranium is secondary to just how
| unbelievably energetic (per unit mass of fuel) fission
| is.
| loeg wrote:
| Energy density is the main reason you don't need much
| volume of uranium. Fission is just extremely energetic.
|
| That c2 factor in _E = m c2_ is huge (9 * 1016).
|
| It is really hard for humans to intuit about factors of
| ten to the power of 16 or 17.
| Jabbles wrote:
| You need to include the units, else that doesn't make
| much sense - many physicists use units such that c = 1.
|
| In this case the units (for speed2) you want are m2/s2 =
| J/kg
| loeg wrote:
| The fun thing is, the units are basically unimportant! A
| factor of 10^3 or two is peanuts on 10^17. Humans have
| just as terrible intuitions about 10^14 and 10^11 as they
| do about 10^17.
| StreamBright wrote:
| Your face when people figure out that burning coal
| produces 100x amount nuclear waste than an average
| nuclear power plant.
|
| Your face #2 when people realise that this nuclear waste
| goes to the environment unfiltered.
|
| https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-
| sta...
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-
| more-...
|
| https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-
| fired-po...
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.ih.gov/20005612/
| dtech wrote:
| If you scale this up you're also having more Area. If that
| hall contains all the waste from decades of energy for
| France, I'm sure we can also build 1 in Germany, Italy, and
| every US state.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Saying Nuclear waste is not a problem is like saying taking a
| shit in your neighbors yard is not a problem. Shit can be
| packed into plastic bags, composted, and eventually stops
| smelling.
|
| Some of us believe that if we can't generate power without
| creating waste for future generations, we should go without
| the power.
|
| Seriously, we don't need it.
| option wrote:
| yes, nuclear waste is like taking a 10x smaller than the
| grain of rise shit in your neighbor's yard.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Sure, but even a grain of sand that I can't build on or
| walk over is still going to be annoying. It's still just
| rude no matter how small you think the problem is.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you also can't build on or walk over a
| large pile of garbage. At least with the grain of sand
| there's not much area displaced.
| option wrote:
| we are in a climate crisis and wind/solar _alone_ are
| just not going to cut it.
|
| And nuclear is the safest power source (measured in
| deaths/twh) which humans have been using for decades.
| dijit wrote:
| You know what, you're right- I agree.
|
| However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely
| destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to
| measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us
| in droves, now and long into the future.
|
| Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a "known" issue,
| and were scared of what we know.
|
| I'm talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its
| nuclear power draw with mostly coal.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I haven't read that we can't just recapture the carbon by
| re-planting a bazzilion trees. I'll do some googling now.
| loeg wrote:
| The problem with trees-as-carbon capture is:
|
| 1. They are only a net store of carbon while they're
| alive.
|
| 2. Because of that, you need to dedicate land to carbon-
| capture forest, indefinitely.
|
| 3. Burning fossil fuels for energy releases more and more
| carbon into the atmosphere.
|
| Like, you get N tons of carbon captured out of a given
| land area. It's constant per area. So you would need to
| continually grow the amount of forested land just to
| follow the amount of carbon released by burning fossil
| fuels.
|
| But: land is finite. The actual worldwide trend has been
| to deforest land, either for lumber, or slash-and-burn
| for subsistence farming in poor countries, or just to
| allow for population growth, or the large land area
| needed for wind and solar farms. We don't have a huge
| surplus of not-yet-forest land -- can't grow trees in
| deserts.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Where are Sweden, which does not have any coal plants and
| is a net exporter of energy replace nuclear with coal?
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-
| sou...
|
| That claim is simply plain misinformation.
|
| For the import vs export of energy you find that here:
|
| http://media.matochklimat.nu/2021/02/image1.jpg
|
| Sweden import much more coal energy when Barseback and
| Ringhals was up and running.
|
| Source for graph: http://matochklimat.nu/analys-svensk-
| el-fortsatter-att-trang...
| dijit wrote:
| Sweden imports energy from countries which use coal
| plants.
|
| The Swedish ethos is "we are green. It was the other
| guys!"
| godelski wrote:
| > Saying Nuclear waste is not a problem is like saying
| taking a shit in your neighbors yard is not a problem.
|
| The weird thing is that you're taking a shit in your
| neighbor's yard. I mean if they do it in their own yard
| it's weird, but there's nothing wrong with it. I mean this
| is what we do with dog shit.
|
| The problem is that everyone shits. Sure, nuclear shit
| smells a lot more than solar shit or coal shit, but there's
| a hell of a lot less of it. We're talking a cat vs herd of
| rhinos. If I had to clean up one of the two I honestly
| don't care how much that cat's shit smells, I'm picking
| that job every single time. And you know what, the
| researchers seem to agree
|
| > The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence
| that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to
| the environment than other electricity production
| technologies
| aszantu wrote:
| The places where uranium is mined is uninhabitable
| afterwards :(
| godelski wrote:
| Yeah, but because there is a giant hole in the ground,
| but that's not specific to uranium mining. Luckily 1)
| uranium is extremely energy dense so we don't have to
| mine as much of it and 2) people usually don't live where
| mines open up in the first place. If we're talking about
| uranium mining you may notice that Canada isn't
| particularly habitable to begin with. Though in situ
| mining is pretty popular with uranium because it is cheap
| and results in less contaminants.
| dtech wrote:
| There is almost no way to generate energy without waste for
| future generations, CO2 for fossil fuels, nuclear waste,
| electronic and heavy-metal waste for solar and batteries.
|
| Saying we should only use methods that don't provide waste
| is saying we should reduce energy consumption to 1-5% of
| current global and ditch all cars, ships and airplanes.
| Even if you are 100% morally right you're never going to
| convince humanity of that.
| biren34 wrote:
| I'm sorry to say, but the idea that "we don't need energy"
| is both false and dangerous.
|
| The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far,
| far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially
| with current living standards.
|
| The only reason we can support that many is because of a
| complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce
| far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables
| distribution of that food to where the people are.
|
| Without fossil fuels, we couldn't even produce the
| fertilizer needed to support the food. You _could_ argue
| that there is some alternative set of lifestyles that would
| enable to eliminate fossil fuels without asking 90% of the
| population to die, but that would similarly require some
| sort of top-down totalitarian regime in order to get there
| and keep us there.
|
| At this point, we do _need_ the energy. The only way to
| maybe not need it would be to somehow put a global version
| of Stalin in a position of absolute power.
|
| Failing to understand just how critical energy is to any
| sort of non-apocalyptic future is one of the biggest
| dangers in our current political debate about what should
| come next.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I would like to do some more reading about this, do you
| have any links? The wikipedia page is a little light on
| detail.
|
| I agree that we should have food security for everybody,
| and I agree that if we don't provide everyday people with
| power for heating and cooking they will just start
| burning things again which would create a bigger
| disaster.
|
| But when I look around me I see massive amounts of waste
| in every sector because electricity is so cheap.
| michael1999 wrote:
| The world population at the beginning of the 20th c (i.e.
| before the oil age) was ~1B, which was the highest in all
| of history. We are currently ~8B, on our way to 10-14 by
| the end of this century.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Absolutely agree that arresting population growth should
| be a number one priority.
|
| Update: Thankfully, it looks like it has started to slow.
| https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
| scatters wrote:
| Look at your own body. Half of the nitrogen in your body
| tissue - in particular, in protein - was clawed from the
| atmosphere by the Haber process. There is simply no
| replacement for industrial society.
| fermienrico wrote:
| Ridiculous Arm-chair Concept:
|
| - What if we make a 1 meter wall thick lead / steel container
| and seal the waste in and leave it? Surely nothing can break
| it, not even an earthquake. Just make a giant tennis court
| sized containers and dump stuff in there. We know how to build
| bridges, surely we can build large containers.
|
| Just want to learn, I am sure this is proposed and would love
| to know why its a stupid idea.
| hedora wrote:
| What if we made a giant four sided pyramid out of stone, and
| used the inner 1% of its volume to store your box? We could
| put it in the middle of the desert, and hope it gets covered
| in sand.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| _begins quest for ancient nuclear waste in Egypt_
| Rarebox wrote:
| To discourage people from finding the box inside, we could
| insert traps to hinder explorers.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Maybe also spread some myth about an ancient curse to
| ward off looters.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| You can't open and close the box to put new stuff in, so you
| have to wait till you have enough to fill a big box. The
| stuff you are collecting waiting to have enough to fill the
| box needs managing anyhow.
|
| The big boxes still need armed guards and a stable government
| so that it that they are not dismantled and used as weapons
| by future generations of extremists.
| seoaeu wrote:
| This is basically what we already do, and it works fine. But
| opponents will still pester you about where to put the sealed
| boxes :P
| drran wrote:
| Put it under your home.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Sure! How much am I being paid for the nuissance of
| construction, and ongoing disturbance of my day-to-day
| life when waste deliveries occur?
|
| So now that your appeal to emotion has failed, do you
| have any actual points?
| ncallaway wrote:
| If someone else is paying the cost to excavate, bury,
| secure, backfill, then sure.
| random5634 wrote:
| The problem is in part the anti-nuclear folks don't want the
| problem to be solved. So you can build a skyscraper 100 feet
| tall in a high earthquake zone, but you can't build a
| container. The normal approach (france etc) is to recycle and
| then vitrify the leftovers and store in a container. You get
| much shorter half lives, much less waste. So even if it comes
| out the container, it's still "in" something. Of course, you
| can build a reasonably secure container as well.
| lispm wrote:
| There are a lot of authoritarian and pro-nuclear countries
| which have not solved the problem. Actually some of them
| (Russia, ...) have the worst environmental track record
| when it comes to nuclear technology.
| effie wrote:
| Russia has a lot of uninhabited space, so the
| contamination does not seem to be a big problem for them.
| Lots of countries behave this way, UK and US included.
| lispm wrote:
| Western countries have spent many billions to secure the
| nuclear reactors of rotten USSR / Russian submarines
| which were endangering the baltic sea and also the Soviet
| RBMK-1000 reactor, which was causing the chernobyl
| disaster...
|
| > Russia has a lot of uninhabited space
|
| Nuclear installations are not in uninhabited space. For
| example the still operating (!) RMBK-style reactors are
| not that far away from major cities.
| effie wrote:
| West had the money and the will, I think that was a
| dollar well spent.
|
| US irradiated large areas of Pacific Ocean and atmosphere
| (US) with its testing program, harming people living
| there and contaminating whole world with radioactive
| isotopes. UK dumped radioactive waste in barrels into
| Atlantic ocean, has bad record on nuclear safety
| (Windscale accidents) and continues to run old nuclear
| power plant that does not pass old safety tests, so they
| make the test less and less restrictive [1].
|
| The lax approach to safety has been observed on all
| sides. It has to improve but it is no reason to stop
| development of nuclear power.
|
| Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as
| people think, if run safely by competent people.
| Chernobyl was a preventable disaster, not solely due to
| technology, but mainly due to incompetence and
| dysfunctional society. Also, the disaster wasn't as bad
| as people think. Few people died when you compare to
| other industrial accidents.
|
| The really badly polluted installations in Russia are the
| military/research ones in restricted areas - Mayak, Lake
| Karachay.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hunterston
| _B_nucl...
| lispm wrote:
| > West had the money and the will, I think that was a
| dollar well spent.
|
| And the need, since the baltic sea has a lot of countries
| which would be effected by leaking nuclear reactors.
|
| mining, processing and 'storing' of nuclear material
| isn't any better in Russia.
|
| > Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as
| people think, if run safely by competent people
|
| I think there is not much reason pretending that the
| russian nuclear industry is especially competent.
| winter_blue wrote:
| The solution to nuclear waste is to use breeder reactors
| extensively. Breeder reactors both (1) substantially reduce the
| radioactivity of nuclear waste, and (2) allow you to get _up to
| 100 times the energy_ out of the same quantity of initial
| nuclear fuel.
|
| A lot of the final breeder reactor products are non-transuranic
| general nuclear fission products (like iodine, caesium,
| strontium, xenon and barium, etc); and if a radioactive
| isotope, often with much shorter half-lives. Some of these are
| even useful in industry.
|
| There are new kinds of reactors, like the Traveling Wave
| Reactor (TVR) which efficiently use fuel like breeder reactors
| as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
|
| There were challenges in the past with breeder reactor design
| (for example as this article outlines:
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-
| bre...), but this is an area that there _should be a lot more
| active research_ in. The long-term benefits of doing so would
| be immense.
| hedora wrote:
| We should move to breeder reactors. However, there is one
| unsolved problem: As the fuel is repeatedly refined/recycled,
| there is a step where it is trivially easy to skim some
| weapons grade material out of the process.
|
| I think this can be solved with a 100% automated (robotic)
| facility, that's completely transparent to outside observers,
| and where no humans are allowed.
|
| Alternatively, pay people 10x market rate to not steal
| material from the line.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Or, we accept that people will occasionally have access to
| weapons-grade nuclear material and move on.
|
| "But YellowApple!" I can already hear someone saying as I
| type this on a half-broken phone while sitting on a toilet,
| "That's a terrible idea!"
|
| Yes, it is, but hear me out:
|
| Let's suppose someone does skim nuclear material off the
| line. What's the likelihood of that nuclear material
| actually making it out of the facility? Geiger counters
| ain't a new invention; surely someone would notice if an
| employee is unexpectedly radioactive. If our thief opted to
| shield the material, we're talking a box that's probably
| too big to even carry, let alone sneak out in a pants
| pocket or something.
|
| So by some magical miracle (or enough bribes, maybe)
| someone manages to snag a piece of nuclear material and
| escape. Now what? Nuclear weapons ain't exactly easy to
| build at home. Maybe sell it? Good luck advertising that:
| "FOR SALE: 1 gram of weapons-grade plutonium. Don't ask how
| I got it. NO FEDERAL AGENTS PLEASE! $42069 OBO
| 234-867-5309"
|
| Aight, so let's say you somehow managed to figure out how
| to build a nuke (or you somehow managed to sell it to
| someone who does and not instead to an undercover cop). Now
| what?
|
| - You could go be a terrorist, I guess. Good luck getting
| away with it, seeing as how that material you pilfered will
| almost certainly come up in a variance report and you're
| suddenly near the top of the suspect list.
|
| - Strongarm some rival nation? If you're able to steal
| weapons-grade material, chances are they can, too.
| Congrats! You've rediscovered the art of mutually assured
| destruction!
|
| - Let's say you don't give a damn about MAD and launch your
| nuke anyway. So now you're nuked back. A bunch of people
| die. That sucks. But! On the bright side, there's at least
| one less unhinged dictator in the world. Possibly two, if
| your rival was also a dictatorship. Do this enough times
| and we might end up with world peace.
|
| All this being to say: yeah, sure, by some unlikely chain
| of events maybe there's a risk here, but considering the
| alternative right now can range from "millions of people
| displaced due to rising sea levels" to "billions of people
| dead due to global famine" to "humanity extinct because
| Earth is now Venus 2: Greenhouse Boogaloo", I'll take my
| chances, thanks.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > some of which already had issues with flooding
|
| Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine
| it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water.
|
| Either way, that's a minute detail. A straw man, if you will.
| Even with the occassional accidents, whether it's kaboom or
| something more benign, nuclear energy is cleaner than fossil.
|
| Plus, that used fuel will likely be reused in the future. I
| think having to store a lot of nuclear fuel is a much better
| problem than having to extract carbon out of the atmosphere, or
| building difficult to recycle chemical batteries out of scarce
| resources.
| redprince wrote:
| > Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to
| imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate
| water.
|
| Schacht Asse II was never a sound choice for waste storage
| because of several incidents of water ingress even during the
| time it was an active salt mine. Water ingress became worse
| after the facility was reused to dump low and medium level
| waste into it. This wasn't some orderly storage either. Drums
| of waste were unloaded into caverns by dozers and then closed
| off with salt. It was accepted that drums would crack open
| right there and then.
|
| Saltwater is highly corrosive and it will eat these drums in
| short order. Waste immobilized with concrete will also not
| resist for long. The current plan is to extract the waste out
| of this mine again before it floods and widespread nuclear
| contamination will result. This cock-up will cost the German
| tax payer an estimated 4 to 6 billion EUR.
| andrewseanryan wrote:
| Probably a dumb question, but why can't we just blast nuclear
| waste out into space with a rocket? Seems like a rather small
| payload in the grand scheme of things.
| andbberger wrote:
| Comes up every time - because nuclear waste is heavy, delta-v
| is expensive, and mostly because nuclear waste was never
| actually a problem.
| threeseed wrote:
| And then what happens when the rocket explodes ?
|
| Because that scenario is very common.
| beefield wrote:
| What I really, really do not get is why the countries that do
| have long term solution do not start selling nuclear waste
| disposal services to other countries.
|
| First, you could charge outrageus amounts of money for the
| service.
|
| Second, you could practically ditch your defence forces simply
| because absolutely nobody would want anyone else to attack a
| country with huge amounts of radioactive waste.
|
| Finally, after some time, you could likely sell the waste back
| as a fuel ingredient to new nuclear technologies.
|
| This only slightly tongue in cheek. Of course I understand that
| proposing that would be a political suicide, but nevertheless,
| it would make sense.
| f6v wrote:
| Let's just build nuclear(power plants and storage) in places
| that aren't flooded.
| aszantu wrote:
| https://nonuclear.se/files/g100rs_en.pdf if all those costs would
| be factored into the price, nuclear power wouldn't be so cheap...
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