[HN Gopher] Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy st...
___________________________________________________________________
Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy standard, White
House says
Author : nixass
Score : 325 points
Date : 2021-04-02 18:00 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| DangitBobby wrote:
| What happens to reactors after 50 or 100 years of global/national
| decline due to environmental and geopolitical circumstances?
| pc86 wrote:
| What happens after another century of dumping 45+ billion tons
| of CO2 and other GHGs into the air?
|
| The question is whether it's better to use nuclear power or
| fossil fuel power. There's little difference, practically
| speaking, between hemming and hawing about statistically small
| events happening re: nuclear power, or what we do a lifetime
| from now, and actively advocating for increased fossil fuel
| usage.
|
| If nuclear can be replaced with something _even cleaner_ and
| _even safer_ then I 'm all for it. But it's short sighted in
| the extreme to actively tear nuclear down when the only
| realistic alternative at that scale is fossil fuel.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Or the discussion is about nuclear versus other forms of
| "green" energy.
| dntrkv wrote:
| And what do you do when the other forms of green energy
| aren't available?
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Well, then nuclear is better than fossil fuels. Has that
| been a barrier to adoption?
| Daho0n wrote:
| >the only realistic alternative at that scale is fossil fuel.
|
| Are the alternatives widespread in places like Denmark not
| realistic (wind from 50% in 2020 to 84% by 2035)? 4th best
| energy architecture performance and the second best energy
| security in the world. Is it not realistic elsewhere?
| politician wrote:
| Correct, wind energy is not present in the same amounts
| everywhere. There are places where wind energy is more
| available and places where it's not available or marginal.
| You can't run your AC off of a gentle breeze.
|
| Finding the best places to install wind farms is
| surprisingly difficult.
| Daho0n wrote:
| With enough wind energy couldn't energy transfer between
| countries and energy storage help? After all it is always
| windy somewhere. I know energy storage is hard and not
| enough alone but couldn't for example Sweden and Denmark
| transfer energy back and forth and only use other energy
| sources as backup?
| politician wrote:
| There's a lot of power loss in transmission over long
| distances. China is attempting to move power from solar
| fields from the eastern deserts to its major cities using
| Ultra High Voltage (UHV) power lines [1], but not without
| problems.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-
| voltage_electricity...
| jhayward wrote:
| > _There 's a lot of power loss in transmission over long
| distances._
|
| No, there's not. If one were to build new transmission
| today one would expect low-single-digits percentage loss
| per 1,000 miles of distance. It's not enough for anyone
| to worry about.
| effie wrote:
| Long distance transmission losses are pretty low. Most of
| energy losses happens in the "last mile" networks.
| gehsty wrote:
| HVAC has significant losses, HVDC has less losses and
| allows power to be transmitted efficiently enough over
| long distances (guess it depends on what you mean by
| long).
|
| A good example is North Sea link, linking the north of
| England to the abundant hydropower in Norway, which
| should come online this year I think. HVDC links
| connecting European countries of the length 400-600km are
| becoming quite common, unfortunately subsea cables are
| prone to failures and can cause a lot of outages etc.
| politician wrote:
| Would you be OK with putting the reactors on the Moon and
| beaming the power down to Earth?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Sure, 8 light minutes away sounds great. We'll even get some
| light out of the transmission of energy to us and the waste
| is taken care of.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| The moon is much, much closer than 8 light minutes away.
| Are you thinking of the sun? It's already doing a good job
| at sending energy to us from nuclear reactions.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| That's the joke. The Sun is safe, cheap fusion at a
| distance. Enough sunlight hits the Earth in 30 minutes
| (I've seen figures as low as 2 minutes from the UAE, but
| am conservative for argument's sake) to power humanity
| for a year.
| kergonath wrote:
| We're never going to cover any significant portion of the
| Earth with solar panels, though. And the photoelectric
| effect has efficiency limits.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Can you provide evidence why we wouldn't or can't? We are
| only limited by panel production and deployment rates.
| We're not going to run out of land or raw materials.
| kergonath wrote:
| For a start, 2 thirds of the Earth's surface are oceans.
| Then, fields and other agricultural land is about 40% of
| the land surface area. And we are supposed to grow
| forests as carbon sinks. Then, you have mountains ranges,
| which might or might not be good places to put solar
| panels depending on a whole bunch of factors. Similarly,
| some deserts can be used to put solar panels, at the cost
| of long-range transport for the produced electricity, but
| a lot of them aren't nice places for this type of
| installations (either very cold or with wide temperature
| fluctuations, harsh environment).
|
| That's a lot of places where we can't. And we need to be
| careful where we _can_ put them. We are causing a mass
| extinction event just because of how we destroy
| ecosystems and degrade our environment, and crop fields
| of pastures are much less disruptive than covering
| massive areas with panels.
|
| I am not saying we don't or should not use solar panels
| where it makes sense, just that using the total energy
| received by the Earth as a measure is not really
| relevant, because the land we can allocate to that will
| always be insignificant compared to the surface of the
| Earth. If you factor land use, it is clear that solar
| panels by themselves cannot be all of the answer.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > If you factor land use, it is clear that solar panels
| by themselves cannot be all of the answer.
|
| Disagree. Rebuttal:
| https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
|
| Direct img link: http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-
| content/uploads/2009/08...
| kergonath wrote:
| Right. What does it have to do with this? I pointed out
| that using the total radiation input on Earth as a
| measure is irrelevant, because we are never going to use
| anything close to this.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Right! This demonstrates how little land mass needs to be
| used to power the world entirely from solar. Total solar
| potential is clear, total land use necessary is clear,
| ergo solar can power the world. Anything else is hand
| waving and excuses.
| effie wrote:
| > ergo solar can power the world
|
| You forgot about clouds, nights and current lack of
| capability to store/transport energy to mitigate them.
| This can be solved but it is not trivial.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| What's 'significant'? We're at the point where we are
| adding _gigawatts_ of solar capacity annually. That feels
| significant to me.
| kergonath wrote:
| Significant compared to the Earth's surface area and the
| amount of radiation we receive. Sure, we get a lot of
| energy from the sun. But no, we're never going to turn
| more than a tiny fraction of that into electricity. The
| orders of magnitude just don't match.
| politician wrote:
| Unfortunately, the same NIMBY crowd that hates nuclear
| also hates the idea of fields of solar cells and the idea
| of fields of wind farms.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| And yet, renewables account for almost all new generation
| being turned up.
|
| Turns out there are lots of places to install panels and
| turbines where there aren't NIMBYs.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416
| yellowapple wrote:
| There are also lots of places to build nuclear power
| plants without NIMBYs.
|
| Point being, NIMBYs often have a rather inflated idea of
| what counts as "in my back yard".
| throwawayboise wrote:
| No. Riduculously expensive idea, dangerous and unnecessary.
| jayd16 wrote:
| This is my favorite SimCity 2000 disaster type.
| nabla9 wrote:
| They produce no greenhouse gases.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Well actually I believe they have a rather large upfront
| carbon footprint, but the question is not whether they are
| worse than fossil fuels, but whether we should rely on other
| forms of "green" energy which do not have catastrophic
| failure conditions or rely on a competent society to safely
| maintain. We have already failed to stop global warming and
| we should expect to be in decline, so that's the future we
| should prepare for.
| effie wrote:
| It is not either solar/wind or nuclear, it is use both.
| Technology on worldwide scale isn't in decline.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| I dunno, but that worries me much less than what happens to the
| thermonuclear warheads so I'd say that ship has sailed.
| politician wrote:
| The half-life of Tritium is ~12 years. In a scenario where
| upkeep stopped, eventually enough would decay that the
| warheads would no longer be able to attain their design
| yield.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| They are shut down and they sit where they are?
| DangitBobby wrote:
| In a competent society, yes.
| bserge wrote:
| Soviet-built nuclear power plants did fine... with one notable
| exception.
| ph4 wrote:
| https://leanlogic.online/glossary/nuclear-energy/
| pinacarlos90 wrote:
| There is a bad stigma associated with nuclear energy that I just
| don't understand - Nuclear less impact to the environment when
| compared to other energy sources. What is is the problem with
| nuclear? Is it the cost of maintaining these power plants ?
| josefresco wrote:
| Long term safe storage of the waste. Many regions in the US are
| fighting attempts to store waste in their town.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Unfortunately I think it's mostly the association with nuclear
| weapons. That has added to the not-totally-unreasonable fear of
| accidents like Chernobyl, but without actually evaluating
| whether other existing power stations are equally at risk, or
| if building new (and especially smaller / different designs)
| would be safe.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The average lay person knows "radiation is bad" and that
| Chernobyl blew up. That'll be about it.
|
| People will be genuinely surprised when you tell them it's
| usually the same old mechanism of most other power plants -
| heat boils water, which generates steam, which powers a
| turbine. They're also _really_ surprised to find out a coal
| plant puts out more radioactivity.
|
| Same phenomenon as vaccines - people know very little about the
| mechanism, but have very strong opinions anyways.
| glogla wrote:
| "Anti-nuclear people are the utility version of antivaxxers"
| has not just nice ring to it but quite a bite. I like it.
| effie wrote:
| There is a pretty important difference though.
|
| Vaccine is and should be a matter of personal/parent choice,
| because getting the vaccine is a per-person action and its
| benefits and risks concern only their health, not health of
| other people. The benefit/cost analysis is very different for
| different people, for some it is in favour of getting the
| vaccine, for some it is against. Vaccination program can and
| should respect individual peoples' wishes.
|
| While building more nuclear energy is a strategic country-
| scale decision that cannot respect all people wishes, only
| the majority's.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > getting the vaccine is a per-person action and its
| benefits and risks concern only their health, not health of
| other people
|
| This is definitively not true.
| effie wrote:
| How so? If a man gets vaccinated, he can still catch the
| virus and he can still transmit the virus.
|
| Vaccine helps the immune system to fight the infection,
| but does not stop the body from getting infected and we
| do not know how efficient it is in preventing spreading
| the infection.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It does stop infection. New data out just a few days ago.
| https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0329-COVID-19-Va
| cci...
|
| > Results showed that following the second dose of
| vaccine (the recommended number of doses), risk of
| infection was reduced by 90 percent two or more weeks
| after vaccination. Following a single dose of either
| vaccine, the participants' risk of infection with SARS-
| CoV-2 was reduced by 80 percent two or more weeks after
| vaccination.
|
| Immunocompromised people, folks who have allergies to the
| vaccines, etc. rely on _others_ getting vaccinated to be
| protected via herd immunity.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| The problem is what to do with the nuclear waste you constantly
| produce. And the risks associated with having a new Fukushima
| in your hands. And the proliferation of nuclear technology.
|
| That said it still seems better than many alternatives
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The problem is what to do with the nuclear waste you
| constantly produce.
|
| We know what to do with it. Bury it, deep and somewhere
| remote. The US already has such a place: https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
| pbak wrote:
| Indeed, but then how long does your moral responsibility
| last. Will the United State exist in a thousand year ? Will
| there still be an organization to monitor the place for
| leaks ? How deep is deep enough ?
|
| Also, what about Not the United States ? It seems everybody
| is synchronizing policies, if you hear the rumblings out of
| the European Commission. Where are they gonna store the
| wast ?
| effie wrote:
| We know how to store the waste now and we can keep doing
| the same for hundred years. Why would it become a problem
| later? Is people IQ going to drop? It is a pure straw man
| to ask about what happens with waste monitoring in
| thousand years from now.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Europe has similarly suitable sites.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_r
| epo...
|
| The stuff stored in these facilities is not magic. It
| doesn't get up and run around. The sites are selected to
| be deep enough and to be resilient to leaks. I'm more
| concerned with our culpability for melting the world's
| glaciers and ice caps than the risk of someone digging up
| barrels miles deep a thousand years from now.
| josefresco wrote:
| not yet!
|
| "In the meantime, most nuclear power plants in the United
| States have resorted to the indefinite on-site dry cask
| storage of waste in steel and concrete casks.[14]"
|
| Our local region just fought to shut down a plant, and now
| the fight continues on where to ship (or not) the waste. In
| the meantime of course, they're fighting over these short
| term store options which have guarantees of only 25 years.
| insert_coin wrote:
| The proliferation of nuclear technology is a good thing.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Breeder reactors can produce less waste. You can cask it and
| store it on site if nothing else. It's not a major issue.
| sokoloff wrote:
| People have 99+% irrational fears about radiation.
|
| There are actual challenges with nuclear as well (waste
| disposal being the primary), but those are distantly trailing
| the radiation fear (and not obviously-to-me worse on-balance
| than the fossil fuel alternatives at this point).
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| The problem with nuclear is that it's expensive AND that it
| relies on oversight and regulation to be fully safe. What to do
| with the waste, how to prevent accidents like Chernobyl,
| Fukushima, etc.: that's the problem with nuclear. Ask yourself
| if you want nuclear plants in all of the dysfunctional
| governments around the world, given the risks we know exist.
| Then compare to solar and wind, which are cheaper and safer,
| it's not hard to see why mostly solar/wind are dominating new
| power additions.
|
| I have no problems with nuclear personally, I think we should
| keep safe reactors running as long as our replacements would be
| LNG. I do think new-build nuclear would largely be deployed too
| slowly to help with climate change in the short run, but long-
| run I think it'll be an amazing source of huge amounts of
| power. Maybe we can have specialized reactors on-site which
| deal with the waste from our older reactors or from new
| reactors...not to mention new designs that are passively safe.
| elyobo wrote:
| I see nuclear as insurance.
|
| Solar and wind are much cheaper, but cannot be scaled in
| proportion to demand. Given sufficient advances in storage
| and transmission they may be able to eventually, but maybe
| not.
|
| Building nuclear that we may not end up needing if the
| required advances happen means that our worst case is a
| vastly cleaner energy system, a much better worse case than a
| continuing dependence on coal and gas.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Highly publicized 80s accidents (Three Mile Island in 79,
| Chernobyl in 86) coupled with late-Cold War anti-nuclear
| weapons proliferation protesting resulted in environmentalists
| lumping everything nuclear together until it reached "No"
| criticality.
|
| After that, the reaction has been self-sustaining.
|
| It's easy to campaign to tear something down. It's hard to be
| the one who has to rebuild the replacement. We need people who
| focus on the latter before the former.
| noja wrote:
| Don't spread FUD. Fukushima was ten years ago.
|
| The truth is our systemic desire to cut costs cuts corners.
| Everything after each disaster will have been "obvious".
|
| The price of the tiniest of mistakes is outweighing the
| advantage.
|
| Stick a power plant in the middle of nowhere and charge
| batteries with it if you want to convince people.
| cthalupa wrote:
| ... Did you just accuse someone of spreading FUD when
| they're specifically arguing for people to be less afraid?
|
| Fukushima was bad, but even if you count the deaths from
| the poorly handled evacuation, you're at ~2200 people that
| died because of it.
|
| Coal kills 13,000 people in just the US /every/ year.
| pc86 wrote:
| Fukushima was also caused by an earthquake and tsunami -
| not exactly a scathing indictment of nuclear power itself.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Eh? Earthquakes and Tsunamis happen, so it's a bit weird
| to remove them from the equation.
| deckard1 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure people understood earthquakes and
| tsunamis from the 1960s to 2011.
|
| > not exactly a scathing indictment of nuclear power
| itself.
|
| No, but it's certainly a statement about our ability to
| operate nuclear power. You really can't separate the two.
|
| Fukushima may have been spared the worst, but the amount
| of deaths is only part of the story. Pripyat is still a
| ghost town. That's nearly 50,000 people that were
| permanently displaced from their homes. I imagine quite a
| few people are not returning to the Fukushima area as
| well.
| effie wrote:
| > No, but it's certainly a statement about our ability to
| operate nuclear power. You really can't separate the two.
|
| ... in tsunami endangered areas. Yes, Japanese made a bad
| mistake to let Americans build such a badly designed
| nuclear plant in that region and this was known before
| the disaster. They did not care - the price was good and
| the risk was acceptable to the people in charge.
|
| Most of nuclear plants in the world are not in tsunami
| endangered areas though and are operated safely.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, but if you're going to build a nuclear power plant
| on an island that's prone to be hit by earthquakes and
| tsunamis, it probably makes sense to harden it against
| really bad cases of both of those things.
| effie wrote:
| Yes, but is that an argument against nuclear energy in
| general or argument against building a nuclear plant in
| tsunami-endangered area?
| throwawayboise wrote:
| "Believe the science" seems to be the rationale for many
| other things we are told to do, so why not this?
| kragen wrote:
| Well, in part due to the nuclear weapons programs, the US
| and Soviet governments told a _lot_ of lies about nuclear
| energy in the 01940s, 01950s, 01960s, and 01970s. A lot of
| _the science_ on things like nuclear fuel enrichment isn 't
| actually available publicly, even today, only to people
| whose families have been interviewed to make sure they will
| lie if the government orders to.
|
| So the US Secretary of the Navy is in a position to make an
| informed decision about nuclear reactors--and he's chosen
| to run a significant part of the US Navy on them--but the
| voting public is not.
| effie wrote:
| I'll bite, what's up with those zero prefixes?
| radicalcentrist wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
| cpeterso wrote:
| Preparation for the Y10K problem. Five-digit years is
| something the Long Now Foundation started using to
| encourage people to think longer term:
|
| https://longnow.org/about/
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| lol that's ridiculous. We'll either have wiped ourselves
| out by then or be so far beyond problems like Y2K that
| it's a ridiculous thing to worry about
| kragen wrote:
| More fun than worrying about global pandemics or nuclear
| meltdowns!
| thelean12 wrote:
| Holy hell, talk about premature. That's 100 lifetimes
| away.
|
| Is it still April 1st?
| kragen wrote:
| > _That 's 100 lifetimes away._
|
| Such a pessimist!
| krrrh wrote:
| It's promoted by the Long Now Foundation, as a way of
| encouraging thinking on 10,000 year time scales.
|
| https://longnow.org/
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| That's so -idiotic- short term thinking. 10k years is
| nothing in the timescale of the universe.
| kergonath wrote:
| You're missing the last bit, though. It's "believe the
| science, when the science agrees with my ideas". The truth
| is, a lot of those people claiming IPCC should be listened
| to conveniently ignore the bits in the IPCC reports that
| don't align with their opinions. Also, nobody has time to
| read the reports and spend years training to actually
| understanding them.
|
| We are overall woefully uninformed about these things, to
| the point that the majority of people in some recent
| opinion polls in Europe believe that nuclear power plants
| emit greenhouse gases.
| moolcool wrote:
| Because NIMBYs
| tstrimple wrote:
| This argument is facile. We have a for profit energy
| sector that doesn't want to invest billions of dollars to
| see returns in over a decade when they can build wind
| turbines next month and start making money immediately.
| If you want nuclear power it needs to be a national
| investment (see France). No amount of NIMBY can stop coal
| plants. It seems silly to think that's the thing holding
| back nuclear adoption.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I went back and forth a few times with my opinion on nuclear
| over the years and some points I've gathered, good and bad are:
|
| -Nuclear is indeed a low-carbon energy source.
|
| -It's also what you would want as baseload.
|
| -The costs of storing waste _properly_ have been underestimated
| - a few years ago nuclear operators reached a deal with the
| German government through which they paid 23bln Euros to make
| the waste the government 's problem. The overall sentiment is
| that they were let off the hook easily and the total cost will
| be much higher.
|
| -Both nuclear plants and waste storage facilities are easy
| targets for terrorism - fortunately that didn't happen yet, but
| things like Stuxnet proved that it's entirely in the realm of
| possibility. My pet conspiracy theory is that this, not
| Fukushima was the reason Germany eventually accelerated its
| plans to phase out nuclear.
|
| -You can reprocess spent nuclear fuel which helps both with
| fuel accessibility and waste management.
|
| -It's trivially easy to use the reprocessing infrastructure to
| create weapons-grade plutonium.
|
| -Nuclear is generally safe.
|
| -That being said its mode of failure makes a large area
| inhospitable essentially forever. Topsoil radiation
| measurements usually don't give the full picture of the
| problem.
|
| -Every nuclear disaster resulted in increased safety by
| uncovering design flaws which were a result of cutting corners,
| so especially in the decade after Fukushima costs went up
| around 24% making nuclear the single low-carbon source to
| become more, not less expensive.
|
| -As it stands even China cannot deploy nuclear fast enough to
| compete with renewables on delivered MWh. Since 2012 wind
| consistently delivered more energy in China than nuclear and
| the gap has been widening ever since. With the cost of storage
| plummeting we're heading towards a future where centralised
| power generation may become antiquated.
|
| ----
|
| Overall nuclear has some advantages but there aren't enough of
| them to break the trend of using renewables + gas and storage,
| which on average replace coal faster and cheaper.
|
| It's basically a textbook example of "worse is better".
| effie wrote:
| > _The overall sentiment is that they were let off the hook
| easily and the total cost will be much higher. Even if it is
| more costly, who cares. It 's national infrastructure that
| serves everybody, high costs are acceptable in light of the
| CO2 crisis. And it's not as if that money was burned or
| stolen by few people - it goes to local nuclear industry
| which employs many local inhabitants._
|
| This 'nuclear is costly' argument would be relevant if there
| was a cheaper-than-nuclear replacement for coal energy with
| similar consistent availability and safety record. There
| isn't one.
|
| > _nuclear plants and waste storage facilities are easy
| targets for terrorism - fortunately that didn 't happen yet,
| but things like Stuxnet proved that it's entirely in the
| realm of possibility._
|
| As far as we know from public resources, Stuxnet wasn't a
| terrorist operation, but a state-controlled operation. And it
| wasn't a nuclear disaster - it was destruction of expensive
| equipment due to poor operational security (virus on USB
| drives hacked the network and destroyed the equipment).
|
| Nuclear plants are NOT an easy target for terrorism, and they
| are NOT the preferred target for terrorists. When we read
| about some real terrorist attacks, it's clear they go for
| large death numbers and best visibility. The newer plants
| with domes are built to withstand a plane crash, a terrorist
| would have to be brainwashed by anti-terrorist agency to
| crash the plane into a nuclear plant instead of big city.
|
| Lots of things are in the realm of possibility, but let's get
| real. Crazies attacking a nuclear power plant is a pretty
| small manageable threat, both in terms of probability of
| successful execution and in terms of potential resulting
| damage. Yes some people and equipment will have to be
| maintained to guard the plants, but it's not a big deal.
|
| > _-It 's trivially easy to use the reprocessing
| infrastructure to create weapons-grade plutonium._
|
| Yes, but again that is not a very relevant problem because in
| most countries where nuclear energy would be most benefitial
| in decreasing CO2 production already have plutonium sitting
| ready in nuclear weapons and can make more - US, China,
| India, US, Europe.
|
| > _nuclear has some advantages but there aren 't enough of
| them to break the trend of using renewables + gas and
| storage_
|
| Gas power is not something we should prop up at all when we
| have the option to build more nuclear power plants. Gas
| burning produces CO2, nuclear operation does not.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I don't agree with you and most experts don't either. Storage
| is a solved problem. Nuclear is a solved probem. Energy
| storage on the scale of 1 week+ in cases of blizzards, and
| other freak weather events which are only going to get worse
| over the next century is not viable. Nuclear is here and it's
| safe and it's dependable and it might be the only way to save
| our planet (or at least us humans, the planet would do just
| fine without us).
| Tade0 wrote:
| Doesn't change the fact that nuclear capacity is currently
| not growing nearly as fast as renewables.
| Rule35 wrote:
| Because of non-scientific ideologues. If all the pro-nuke
| people sabotaged solar rollouts would you say that solar
| was less viable, or would you blame the sabotage?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| China still has trouble transporting renewable energy from
| where it is generated (in the west) to where it is needed (in
| the east). They are trying to solve that problem with UHV
| transmission lines, but they aren't there yet.
|
| Nuclear plants can be built close to where they are needed,
| it's an advantage over renewables.
| titzer wrote:
| I think nuclear is also the least disruptive, least
| ecological footprint of all technologies we have. The amount
| of Lithium mined, the production of solar panels, plus all
| the install locations. Solar might be cheaper, but overall it
| means we need to move and manufacture much much more stuff,
| and all of that requires energy and land use changes. In
| order to fully power our economies with solar, we need to
| gobble up even more land than we are already using. That
| literally means deforestation and destruction of other
| habitats for wildlife.
|
| Nuclear is the lowest footprint, biggest-bang-for-the-buck
| technology.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Please excuse this question, but how do you think Lithium
| is "mined"?
| zamalek wrote:
| Bias: I am pro-nuclear, but I try to be realistic.
|
| Nuclear is vastly better for the environment than fossil fuels
| are, _however,_ it is still bad for the environment. This is
| why various groups have protested it in the past. Given both
| viewpoints, my stance is that we should have a real plan to
| phase out nuclear _eventually._
|
| Nuclear is significantly cleaner than fossil fuels. In
| addition, nuclear could potentially produce a huge amount of
| energy per "time spent deploying" (especially once there is
| expertise building nuclear reactors). Finally, nuclear waste
| can be physically handled and even further processed (in
| thorium reactors), which is in stark contrast to CO2 which
| dissipates into the atmosphere and is extremely difficult to
| sequester.
|
| The problem is that nuclear isn't a perfect option, and people
| seem to focus on the few caveats over the numerous benefits. If
| there was a commitment to eventually (on the order of decades)
| phase it out, I'm sure many of the green energy purists would
| come to the nuclear party.
| mojzu wrote:
| There are a few I'm aware of:
|
| - Fear of nuclear accidents, 'not in my backyard' reactions
| from communities - Dealing with radioactive waste safely -
| Cost/time overruns building nuclear plants
|
| Although I think all of these could be resolved, and I've heard
| some interesting things about thorium reactors which could be
| even better. I do wonder whether nuclear power is a good answer
| to climate change in particular though (beyond keeping the
| current ones functioning until end of life), nuclear power
| station design/building often takes decades and it seems like
| we have a shorter amount of time than that to make a
| significant difference.
| kergonath wrote:
| > nuclear power station design/building often takes decades
| and it seems like we have a shorter amount of time than that
| to make a significant difference.
|
| It takes decades _now_ , but we know hot to build them
| quickly and more efficiently. We've done it in the past.
|
| Now, it is too late to avoid climate change anyway, and
| almost certainly too late to avoid crossing the +2 degrees
| threshold in a couple of decades. We _are_ too late already.
|
| But if we want to minimise the cascading issues that are
| heading our way, it's not "let us do something or something
| else". We need to redirect as much as we can of our industry
| to decarbonised energy. This means wind _and_ solar _and_
| nuclear fission _and_ hydrogen, and a whole bunch of R &D
| into the next steps for all of that (including nuclear
| fusion). Also, we need to consume less. Quite a lot less, in
| fact.
| Lammy wrote:
| The people who own the newspapers and the people who own the
| oil companies are BFFs. See the Bohemian Club for example,
| organized in 1872 in the San Francisco Chronicle office.
| leecarraher wrote:
| I don't see anything in the plan about reviving the Yucca
| Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. This is a key storage facility
| that's been used as a political scapegoat for far too long. No
| one lives near the facility, it's set in one of the lowest
| seismically active areas in the US, has almost no possibility of
| leaching waste material into groundwater and the environment. Yet
| people will fight tooth-and-nail against it for what, to preserve
| dry cask storage in people's actual backyards, in populated
| areas, with undetermined contamination risks.
| numpad0 wrote:
| My conspiracy headcanon is governments don't want spent fuel
| gone because they are strategic asset and not waste despite the
| phraseology.
| unchocked wrote:
| Great news! France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear
| power, and it's a very plausible part of the solution.
|
| Relatedly I've been thinking about how to compare the moral
| culpability of anti-nuclear activists for climate change to that
| of oil companies. Are sins of preventing beneficial action
| comparable to sins of taking harmful action? Do intentions offset
| effects?
| frankharv wrote:
| Yes the French have a better system for nuclear. In the US the
| military can do anything nuclear they want.
|
| But for civilian nuclear program it is all political. What did
| we spend on Yucca Mountain?
|
| Chicago Bridge bungled their South Carolina reactor job so bad
| that Westinghouse had to take the job over from them. Complete
| shambles and Westinghouse had to sell their nuclear division to
| Toshiba. All one giant mess. The AP2000 NextGen reactor program
| is a failure. South Carolina plant never made it online. Busted
| budgets and nothing generating power.
| https://www.npr.org/2017/08/06/541582729/how-the-dream-of-am...
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Stop being a negative Nancy, if france can do it we can do
| it. Who cares what the antinuke people think get some
| initiaives rolling and lets get going.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Opens up a can of worms into how intent factors into
| culpability.
| bigbob2 wrote:
| > Relatedly I've been thinking about how to compare the moral
| culpability of anti-nuclear activists for climate change to
| that of oil companies. Are sins of preventing beneficial action
| comparable to sins of taking harmful action? Do intentions
| offset effects?
|
| Seems like knowledge could come into play here. Someone could
| have made the same argument about coal 150 to 200 years ago
| because the data didn't yet exist to suggest it was harmful.
| From their perspective, coal could have looked better than the
| alternatives. Not sure how culpable activists would be in that
| scenario, at least relative to fossil fuel companies of today
| which deliberately release disinformation to their own benefit.
| unchocked wrote:
| But after 1988, everyone knew.
| crazygringo wrote:
| If you're interested, that question is most commonly referred
| to in philosophy as the "trolley problem". [1]
|
| It's actually a huge area of philosophical debate. So while the
| bad news is there's no straightforward answer -- instead
| there's deep disagreement among philosophers who think about
| exactly this for a living -- the good news is you could spend
| literal weeks learning about the arguments on both sides if you
| wanted to.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
| drran wrote:
| It's better to watch these lectures instead:
| https://justiceharvard.org/ .
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| The trolley problem and other ethical issues are covered in
| "the good place" on Netflix in a very entertaining way.
|
| Though this solution always gives me a chuckle -
| https://external-
| preview.redd.it/wO3QAQsLh2xklK3-ifXUdyEjaAS...
| [deleted]
| de6u99er wrote:
| I'd argue it epends on how you define clean energy, because
| nuclear waste is still an unsolved oroblem and a ticking
| timebomb.
|
| Typing this on my phone while watching Godzilla vs. Kong ;)
| effie wrote:
| > nuclear waste is still an unsolved oroblem and a ticking
| timebomb.
|
| This is nonsense. Yes nuclear waste from power plants has its
| specifics, but we know what to do with it since 40's. There is
| no real problem with it.
| standardUser wrote:
| I'm a convert. I was anti-nuclear power, now I am pro with a
| boatload of caveats.
|
| As a person who changed their mind, let me offer this advice to
| the people commenting here. Don't pretend there aren't legitimate
| concerns with nuclear power. Accidents did in fact happen and,
| given enough time and more reactors, will absolutely happen
| again. That's not a reason not to build more nuclear power, but
| let's not play make-believe about it. Don't pretend that just
| because we are better at handling nuclear waste it is a solved
| problem. It isn't. A hundred-fold increase in nuclear power
| generation would be a roughly hundred-fold increase in nuclear
| waste that must be stored away from all life for several hundred
| years (until we develop technology to resolve the issue, likely
| long after we're all dead). And maybe most importantly,
| acknowledge that nuclear energy is far more expensive than other
| green energy options and, even if we could drive down the cost,
| it will not solve all our problems. It is, at best, a big part of
| the solution, not "the" solution.
| arithmomachist wrote:
| Nuclear definitely should be paired with energy sources like
| wind and photovoltaics. These sources are aren't consistent, so
| you need something to balance the load at night or when the
| wind isn't blowing. I find it hard to imagine another non-
| carbon energy source that could fill that role aside from
| nuclear energy.
|
| Disposing of nuclear waste is certainly a difficult problem,
| since it requires designing structures to last longer than
| recorded history up to this point. There is at least one good
| answer to this problem that's under construction now in
| Finland, called Onkalo. The issue of nuclear waste disposal
| seems to be as much a political as an engineering problem.
| People don't want to have a nuclear waste dump anywhere near
| them, because they justifiably don't trust the government or
| industry to build it so that it works.
| krasin wrote:
| The new types of reactors can run on the "standard" nuclear
| waste: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Russia-proposes-
| new-...
|
| In Russia, they are slowly getting adoption. Not only that
| allows to use the same fuel twice (so, cheaper energy), the end
| result is significantly less radioactive and does not contain
| isotopes with ~10k years life, which are short enough to be
| dangerous and long enough to be a hassle to store.
|
| A hundred fold increase in the reactors will mean that the new
| closed-fuel-cycle economy will have even more sense, since the
| second stage reactors will also benefit economies of scale.
|
| (not objecting your comment, just adding one improvement)
| syshum wrote:
| >>And maybe most importantly, acknowledge that nuclear energy
| is far more expensive than other green energy options
|
| It is not really though when you factor in ALL of the costs of
| the main renewables (wind and solar), one of the big problems
| with both is the fact their output curves normally do not match
| demand curves every well, meaning when wind and solar are
| producing power, the demand for that power is at its lowest.
|
| Thus wind and solar can only be a viable replacement for Fossil
| fuel and nuclear if you add in methods of energy storage, so
| electricity can be stored when it being produced and then
| consumed when it is needed.
|
| Once you factor in this storage / demand problem the costs of
| wind and solar go through the roof
| opo wrote:
| >...Accidents did in fact happen and, given enough time and
| more reactors, will absolutely happen again.
|
| Well it is a straw man to claim that anyone says there won't be
| nuclear accidents. What people have said is that historically
| nuclear power has been much safer than all the alternatives
| that have been available:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
|
| Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by
| the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so
| many people have an understandable misperception that it is
| more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people
| had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a
| lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could have let to
| catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains
| stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that
| story? How much would the media have covered that if 200
| thousand had been evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?
|
| >...Don't pretend that just because we are better at handling
| nuclear waste it is a solved problem. It isn't. A hundred-fold
| increase in nuclear power generation would be a roughly
| hundred-fold increase in nuclear waste that must be stored away
| from all life for several hundred years (until we develop
| technology to resolve the issue, likely long after we're all
| dead).
|
| In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled
| (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
|
| Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
|
| "...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-
| efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all
| the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides:
| reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last
| tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional
| nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive
| fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter
| half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term
| but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the
| uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them
| to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in
| 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the
| original uranium "
|
| >...IFR development began in 1984 and the U.S. Department of
| Energy built a prototype, the Experimental Breeder Reactor II.
| On April 3, 1986, two tests demonstrated the inherent safety of
| the IFR concept. These tests simulated accidents involving loss
| of coolant flow. Even with its normal shutdown devices
| disabled, the reactor shut itself down safely without
| overheating anywhere in the system. The IFR project was
| canceled by the US Congress in 1994, three years before
| completion.
|
| Unfortunately, the IFR work was cancelled by the incoming
| administration because "it's a symbol":
|
| >...Despite support for the reactor by then-Rep. Richard Durbin
| (D-IL) and U.S. Senators Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL) and Paul
| Simon (D-IL), funding for the reactor was slashed, and it was
| ultimately canceled in 1994, at greater cost than finishing it.
| When this was brought to President Clinton's attention, he said
| "I know; it's a symbol."
|
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
|
| >...And maybe most importantly, acknowledge that nuclear energy
| is far more expensive than other green energy options
|
| Cost should always be a consideration, but when you see people
| conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a
| disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid and it isn't
| clear what they are really trying to accomplish.
|
| The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as
| high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some
| advocates and they continue to strongly support subsidizing it.
| The potential costs for renewables + storage is about the cost
| of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some
| advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it
| decades ago.)
|
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
|
| Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind
| to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously at least a
| direct cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some
| advocates.
|
| Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid
| to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA.
| This will not be cheap, simple or easy to protect against
| terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amigas super
| station hasn't been completed yet. The potential costs here
| don't seem to matter to some advocates.
|
| Some advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on
| natural gas peaker plants where necessary to get around the
| costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent
| GHG in the short term. (There are lots of atmospheric losses in
| the capture and distribution of natural gas.) No one concerned
| about climate change seriously thinks that burning natural gas
| is a long term answer.
|
| >...It is, at best, a big part of the solution, not "the"
| solution.
|
| I agree.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I don't think anyone is pretending accidents don't happen, only
| that over all there are far fewer deaths per gigawatt of
| nuclear than other options.
|
| Handling nuclear waste is a hard problem but it's 100x easier
| than handling CO2 waste.
|
| And is nuclear more expensive than other renewables? I think
| that really depends, I don't think you can compare 99.9%
| reliability power to 95% reliability power. They're two
| different goods sold at two different prices. You can use
| batteries or other storage to convert the 95% reliability into
| 99.9% but then that puts renewables at a cost far above
| nuclear.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _I think that really depends, I don 't think you can
| compare 99.9% reliability power to 95% reliability power._
|
| I question whether you can call any renewable 95% reliable.
| The capacity factor of solar in the US has averaged 25% and
| wind at about 35%:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States
|
| One can certainly argue a large enough grid can shuffle
| energy to and from across large areas to create 'aggregate
| reliability' of course.
| godelski wrote:
| I think the major issue is that those uninformed on the
| subjects treat the energy problem as if there is a singular
| solution: renewables, nuclear, fossil fuels. Which this is
| such a weird way to present the problem. But then again I see
| a lot of people complain about CCS because it "encourages the
| use of fossil fuels," implying that means emissions, which it
| doesn't. The conversation has become political and not
| technical and I think that's what is frustrating to me. (I
| bring up CCS because it is discussed in the article and also
| something controversial in the public eye but not in the
| scientific community)
| kart23 wrote:
| Fun/Depressing fact: The USA has more floating reactors than
| reactors on land.
| alex_anglin wrote:
| Source?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| US Navy nuclear fleet.
|
| Caveat: US Navy is more responsible about operating its
| reactors than commercial generators.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Further caveat: it's arguably much easier to cool a reactor
| when said reactor floats on a literally-planet-covering
| heatsink.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Absolutely. Worse case scenario, you scuttle the vessel
| and the reactor is surrounded by a cooling medium in
| perpetuity.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I think they're talking about the reactors in naval ships.
| The USA has little (any?) buoyant nuclear power generation
| for commercial use.
| m1117 wrote:
| +1
| sto_hristo wrote:
| For the massive amount of demonization nuclear got, it's still
| being developed and moving forward. Modular nuclear reactors will
| be the next leap, which will provide cheaper and faster to build
| power plants.
|
| Wind, solar are simply a vogue for the look-at-me trendy selfie
| people, a political platform for the ones seeking easy office,
| and easy cash grab for the sharks. All these are transient things
| that will eventually go away. Nuclear is the only viable future
| as far as current physics are concerned.
| effie wrote:
| Solar and wind could be long term solution if we get enough
| energy storage available - flywheels, gravity and electric
| batteries.
| sand500 wrote:
| Nuclear should absolutely replace fossil fuel baseload. There is
| an increasing difference between non solar generation during the
| day, and in the evening where there is no solar but demand is
| highest. Currently the difference is made up with natural gas
| peaker plants.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
| philipkglass wrote:
| I hope that the federal government can provide incentives to keep
| reactors running that would otherwise close prematurely.
|
| 5.1 gigawatts of American reactors are expected to retire this
| year: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46436
|
| It's a shame that the US is retiring working reactors while still
| burning fossil fuels for electricity. Reactors are far safer and
| cleaner than fossil electric generation. It's mostly the low
| price of natural gas that is driving these early retirements. Low
| gas prices have also retired a lot of coal usage -- which is
| good! -- but we'd make more climate progress if those low prices
| didn't also threaten nuclear generation.
|
| Some states like New York already provided incentives to keep
| reactors running for climate reasons:
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41534
|
| Federal policy could be more comprehensive.
| DennisAleynikov wrote:
| if we are to come out the other side of this climate emergency
| we must keep our reactors online. the purity testing of what do
| we do with the waste is not helpful critique when we are still
| reliant on coal
| snuxoll wrote:
| The ignorance of the externalities of fossil fuels and a
| bipolar hyper focus on those of nuclear energy is mind
| boggling at this point.
|
| I'm all for developing renewables, but we cannot abandon the
| one good technology we have for generating massive amounts of
| energy our base loads demand without polluting our air.
| arithmomachist wrote:
| Three Mile Island and Chernobyl loom very large in the
| imaginations of the boomers and gen x, respectively.
| Nuclear plant meltdowns are world news on the few occasions
| they've happened, whereas horrifying explosions and
| accidents at fossil fuel plants aren't considered
| remarkable. It's the same reason people overestimate the
| risk of flying relative to driving.
| godelski wrote:
| There's also an ignorance of the externalities of
| renewables. Yes, they are magnitudes better than fossil
| fuels, but it amazes me how much people bring up uranium
| mining and ignore everything to do with rare earth mining
| in general. Or talk about waste storage of heavy metals and
| lithium. The problem is that _everything_ has a cost. You
| can 't make good comparisons if you only look at the costs
| of one system and the benefits of another. These are
| extremely complicated equations that people act like they
| are simple. I also frequently see a lot of belief that the
| issues are purely political (renewables and nuclear) when
| there is so much technical challenges still left.
|
| There's no free lunch.
|
| I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to say "nuclear
| > renewables" or even "renewables > nuclear" (this is a
| dumb comparison imo), but rather that every time we have
| these conversations in HN and most places we aren't even
| attempting to make a one-to-one fair comparison. I just
| wish that, especially on a technical form, that the
| conversations would focus on technology and science rather
| than the politics. Though I understand that not every
| (anyone) is really qualified to talk technically so we talk
| politically because we still want to engage.
| SCHiM wrote:
| Indeed that is the strangest thing. By _any_ metric coal is
| far worse. Even the metric "amount of radioactive material
| that ended up in the atmosphere per watt of energy." (Coal
| contains trace amounts of radioactive material, that gets
| spread when burned).
|
| The fact of the matter is, that we can dump all our waste
| on a couple of football fields worth of space. Or even
| better: store it in a cave somewhere deep and dark and away
| from rivers.
| lainga wrote:
| I'm going to sound tinfoil-y, but coal doesn't have dual
| strategic purposes which made it in the Soviet Union's
| best interests to focus opposition on it. Look into what
| happened to funding for the CND in Britain after 1991.
| Multicomp wrote:
| This is probably one of those hacker news comments where
| it sounds good for 1 second then when you stop to think
| about it it falls apart, bu here goes.
|
| throw the waste in a bucket strong enough to survive
| hitting earth at terminal velocitty. place bucket in
| spacex falcon9 rocket. launch rocket into orbit with
| escape velocity. watch nuclear waste vanish into vacuum
| of space forever. if crash, collect bucket and restart
| with new rocket.
|
| financially costly? yes. solves the 'what about in 5000
| years when someone opens it or it leaks?' questions, yes.
| VT_Dude wrote:
| I'm torn on which one second response is best. Contenders
| are:
|
| 1. Reprocessing is a better technological solution.
|
| 2. That waste is much safer in it's current location in a
| dry cask in the back lot behind a power plant than it
| would be on even the safest rocket.
|
| 3. Even if we punt waste disposal or reprocessing to
| future generations, we are still better off stacking
| waste in dry casks in the back lot behind power plants
| than burning coal.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 4. "Actually, giving up nuclear and politics on Earth and
| using said rockets to start building space habitat on L2,
| L4, L5, Moon surface and so on and do life and society
| and nuclear up there makes far more sense"
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There are a lot of schemes that will solve the factual
| problem.
|
| But I think the real problem is emotional. People are
| afraid of mushroom clouds and mutants.
|
| They don't say that because that's not how we're wired.
| We come up with better sounding arguments to believe. But
| what need to be solved is the emotional problem.
| cperciva wrote:
| The standard answer is "there's too much of a risk that
| an explosion would spread nuclear waste through the
| atmosphere". These days I'm not sure if it's true --
| we've learned a lot about building containers which are
| safe even during rapid unscheduled disassemblies, and
| used them e.g. when sending nuclear powered rovers to
| Mars -- but that's the usual concern.
| perardi wrote:
| I think there's a _few_ orders of magnitude difference in
| the amount of radioactive material in an RTG in a probe
| bounds for Mars, _and the total radioactive daughter
| particle output of a nuclear reactor_.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I mean we're wishing for a bucket that can survive
| terminal velocity impact with the earth and is yet light
| enough to ride a rocket, why not add to that wish that it
| could survive explosion from said rocket?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Ironically perhaps, the best reason not to do this is "It
| is extremely likely that, given sufficient time, we will
| either figure out a way to use the waste besides high-
| yield weapons or a cheaper way to dispose of the waste."
|
| Earth is huge. At the rate reactors create waste, the
| amount of land consumed by storing it is staggeringly low
| (the higher risks are transportation, which unfortunately
| the rocket idea doesn't solve unless we build a dedicated
| rocket site next to each reactor). Low enough to justify
| the risk-over-time of securely sequestering it instead of
| throwing it away.
| whatshisface wrote:
| One hundred million years later, a tribe of evolved cats
| sees an asteroid streak through the sky...
| secfirstmd wrote:
| Haha. I've often said cats would likely take over.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Another crazy idea would be to put nuclear reactors
| themselves in orbit, and then beam the energy down to the
| surface. Space is already pretty thoroughly radioactive,
| so a meltdown goes from "ZOMG WE'RE GONNA GROW EXTRA ARMS
| AND DIE OF CANCER" to "meh, just another Tuesday".
| cpeterso wrote:
| But then you have nuclear-powered space lasers, which
| will scare people.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Yeah, but if people don't like it, what are they gonna
| do? Complain? That'll just draw the attention of the
| nuclear-powered space lasers :)
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| How does one efficiency "beam down" gigawatts of energy?
| Or at all?
| cthalupa wrote:
| Light. Focusing mirrors or lasers.
|
| But as others have pointed out, why would you bother with
| building space based nuclear plants and then converting
| that energy to light when you could just use the sun?
| DennisP wrote:
| Microwaves. Ground station has to be several square
| kilometers, but it's cheap and birds can fly through the
| beam without harm.
|
| For economic reasons you pretty much have to use phased
| array transmitters, with a reference signal from the
| ground to make it coherent, so if the beam gets repointed
| it gets a lot more diffuse than that.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I've seen how this plays out in SimCity. No thank you!
| DennisP wrote:
| I support nuclear but if you're beaming power from space,
| it might as well be from solar panels. In geostationary
| orbit you have power 24/7, with 5X more sunlight per day
| than panels on the ground. The only time your satellite
| goes into shadow is for a few minutes per day around the
| equinoxes, half an hour max. Capacity factor is still
| over 99%.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's too easy for space junk to destroy it, also a single
| point of failure or attack. It's a terrible solution as
| long as we remain a warlike species.
| DennisP wrote:
| I hate to break it to you but most of our power stations
| are vulnerable to attack already. Certainly anything near
| the coast could be taken out by our major adversaries,
| even with conventional attack.
|
| For a lot of plants, an anonymous cyberattack could
| probably do it. That'd be way worse than an attack to
| geostationary, which very few actors could manage, and
| probably nobody could pull off anonymously.
|
| Space junk seems a more serious problem:
|
| https://physicsworld.com/a/space-debris-threat-to-
| geosynchro...
|
| I've seen various proposals to clean it up but it'd take
| some work.
| 8note wrote:
| With geostationary? Don't they track a location on the
| earth? Is the satellite not in the earth's shadow at
| night?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Geostationary is _super_ far out-- you 're effectively in
| constant sun:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
|
| Except, as the parent noted, very briefly during the
| equinoxes.
| yellowapple wrote:
| And even that seems "easy" to circumvent by having
| redundant satellites, such that during the equinoxes
| (equinoxen?) only a fraction of said satellites are
| shadowed out at once. Alternately, a massive battery or
| capacitor bank could give the receiver enough buffer to
| hold out through an equinox-induced shadowing.
| bserge wrote:
| Basically Gundam 00 haha. I was young when it aired, but
| it left a long lasting impression of what the future of
| space exploration might be like. Space elevators and
| massive solar arrays around the planet.
| Keyframe wrote:
| We already have that nuclear reactor beaming energy down
| for us to collect.
| DennisP wrote:
| It's just too bad the planet keeps getting in the way.
| yellowapple wrote:
| And sometimes the moon.
| bserge wrote:
| Interesting idea, but my next thought was "how are you
| going to cool that thing?!" :D
| kelnos wrote:
| Not sure in which direction you're joking, but heat
| dissipation can actually be a difficult problem in space,
| at least as close to the sun as Earth is, while outside
| Earth's atmosphere. For example:
| https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
| nasa/2001/a...
| bserge wrote:
| That's exactly what I meant. Running a nuclear fission
| reactor (along with the high power beams to Earth) in
| vacuum might prove... problematic.
| panzagl wrote:
| Or it could blow away the Van Allen belts and fry
| everything else in orbit, then drop plutonium somewhere.
| dls2016 wrote:
| > Even the metric "amount of radioactive material that
| ended up in the atmosphere per watt of energy."
|
| My old man worked at TMI. We moved to a new house and one
| day he set off the radiation monitors going _into_ work.
| Turns out we had a radon problem. This part of PA isn 't
| exactly coal country, but close enough.
|
| My bro was an auxiliary operator at TMI until a few
| months ago... shut down.
| effie wrote:
| Please define you acronyms. What is TMI and PA?
| complexworld wrote:
| Three mile island, Pennsylvania
| w0de0 wrote:
| Pay spaceX to shoot it into the sun, why not?
| notriddle wrote:
| As long as you're sure it'll actually go into space and
| not just explode in the upper atmosphere.
| _Microft wrote:
| From Earth, it is much easier to eject something from the
| solar system than to get it to fall into the sun by the
| way.
|
| Well, not just Earth but from almost everywhere in the
| solar system (assuming being on an almost circular
| orbit).
| eloff wrote:
| You'd need to fire the rocket to slow down sufficiently
| to fall into the sun right?
|
| Just imagining the solar system as a bowling ball at the
| center of a trampoline surrounded by fast moving billiard
| balls. The problem is probably the speed the earth is
| moving at, plus the speed we had to get the rocket up to,
| to get it off earth.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> You 'd need to fire the rocket to slow down
| sufficiently to fall into the sun right?_
|
| Yes, which is around 30 km/s of delta-v, as compared with
| only 12 km/s delta-v to boost an object from Earth's
| orbit (assuming you launch it in the same direction that
| Earth is traveling) to escape velocity from the solar
| system.
| ldbooth wrote:
| Why not? Because the environmental cost of a failed
| launch is massive. It's radioactive roulette. Where it
| lands... Depends on which way the wind is blowing.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Given unlimited money, this might be reasonable, but it's
| worth noting that the delta-V requirements for shooting
| something into the Sun are pretty astronomically (pun
| intended) high.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I simply don't understand those people who claim to want to
| fix the problem but balk at nuclear. It's like they'd
| prefer going back to rubbing two sticks together for heat
| and building lean-tos for shelter. Which is where we might
| end up going back to if we keep overpopulating and
| destroying the earth and climate.
| jhayward wrote:
| I simply don't understand those people who claim to want
| to fix the problem but insist on only getting 1/10th the
| electricity for their invested dollar, and at a schedule
| 10x slower than renewables. It's like they are being
| deliberately obtuse.
| effie wrote:
| It's not about money, but about replacing the coal and
| gas power plants. Renewable sources can't do that alone,
| they need massive energy storage facilities (which so far
| do not exist).
| ldbooth wrote:
| Because storage isn't tax credit incentivized, at least
| in the US. Coal still is. And FYI California will install
| 1.3GW of storage this year, and a storage tax credit is
| likely by end of this year. It's coming. Hopefully we
| find something more elegant or ways to recycle
| storage/battery materials.
| thisisbrians wrote:
| The way I think about the waste: for nuclear, the waste can
| be reliably (and safely) contained in a very small area, far
| from civilization and habitats, where it can't cause much of
| a problem. When we burn hydrocarbons, they pollute the
| atmosphere -- _for the entire planet_.
| legulere wrote:
| The question needs to be asked how new power plants that have
| to cope with much higher building costs can be more cost-
| efficient than already existing ones. It's not like that
| nuclear has any cost-cutting progress like wind and
| photovoltaics still have.
| antattack wrote:
| About Iowas Duane Arnold plant that is being closed:
|
| "The Mark I containment was undersized in the original design;
| the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Harold Denton estimated a
| 90% probability of explosive failure if the pressure
| containment system were ever needed in a severe accident.[18]
| This design flaw may have been the reason that the tsunami in
| 2011 led to explosions and fire in Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
| disaster.[19]" (Wikipedia)
|
| It's likely that many old power plants are just not safe and
| too costly to operate reliably.
| lumost wrote:
| The follow-on question is why aren't these plants retrofitted
| to be secure? I'd somewhat naively expect that its simpler to
| upgrade an existing plant than permit a new plant in.a
| separate location.
| benchaney wrote:
| It's possible that it would be more expensive to upgrade
| than to replace in many cases.
|
| While I support expanding nuclear power capabilities in
| general, a straightforward rule like "don't decommission
| old plants as long as fossil fuels are still being used"
| seems dangerous and irresponsible.
| sliken wrote:
| Each plant is unique, and not perfectly understood. Often
| the people that did understand it have forgotten, died,
| moved on, etc.
|
| Understanding, improving, testing, and certification of a
| plan to protect against the huge risks involved is
| expensive and often in practice timelines and budgets often
| go significantly over.
|
| There's numerous MUCH newer designs that: are much smaller,
| much easier to scale, absolutely identical, well
| understood, robust in the face of failure, and don't even
| need operators. Additionally since they are identical they
| get economies of scale and only need a finite number of
| experts on hand, not a group of them per site. You
| literally need a flat site, water, and electrical hookups.
| If you don't provide enough water for cooling they shut
| down. After their useful service life you put them back on
| a train car and ask for a replacement.
|
| Some of these projects are ready to deliver, but the early
| customers have been cancelling. Bill Gates funded a
| project, and there's several around.
| antattack wrote:
| Duane Arnold plant is being replaced with solar panels and
| battery storage:
|
| https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/business/duane-
| arnol...
| effie wrote:
| Yes but their safety could be improved, new containment
| system can be built etc. Governments should step up and
| change the incentives to keep the good plants in operation.
| Being unprofitable is not a good reason to decommission a
| nuclear plant.
|
| > DAEC's operation helps avoid the emission of nearly 4
| million tons of carbon dioxide annually, which is the
| equivalent of taking almost 800,000 cars off the road
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| There are a lot of advantages to designing a better nuclear
| plant to be built than to retrofit one that is designed
| wrong from the beginning
| Lammy wrote:
| Are retrofits and new construction equally possible in
| today's regulatory and media environments?
| notJim wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. Retiring reactors before a green
| replacement is available has been a total disaster for Germany.
| To be honest, I'm pretty agnostic as to what the replacement
| is, but at least keep them going until it's available.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| it's basically what happens when decisions are made only
| based on ratings to get you through the next 4 years, instead
| of long term strategy.
| legulere wrote:
| I would call it unwise, but there has been no disaster.
| Electricity production through fossil fuels went down,
| renewables reached 50% last year while Germany still has one
| of the most stable electricity network worldwide:
|
| https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38.
| ..
| effie wrote:
| 50% of german electric energy production is from high
| availability sources (nuclear+fossil fuels) and Germany's
| network is connected to the continental network, so of
| course the network is stable. It will be hard to get these
| sources down and maintain that stability. Maybe it can be
| done with energy storage, but so far it is not built.
| legulere wrote:
| Those fears have been discussed endlessly. Just look at
| the graph I posted to see the change in the last years
| that is still continuing.
|
| Availability has nothing to do with what you are talking
| about (it's much higher for photovoltaics anyway). Out of
| the 49.5% non-renewables only gas which makes up 12.5
| percent of electricity can really be used to follow
| demand. Coal and nuclear are too slow for that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_factor
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant
|
| https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/presse-und-
| medien/news/2020...
| jhayward wrote:
| > _has been a total disaster for Germany._
|
| What do you define as 'a total disaster'? Coal fuel
| consumption is down enormously, supplanted by renewables and
| a tiny bit of gas generation growth.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| While non-hydroelectric renewables have gone up, fossil
| fuel usage remains largely flat: https://en.wikipedia.org/w
| iki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
|
| Germany's CO2 intensity of electricity isn't actually very
| good. It's worse than the UK, and 7 times more than France.
| jhayward wrote:
| Your use of that graph is misleading. It's not a graph of
| CO2 emissions.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| The above comment didn't say CO2 emissions, it said that
| coal use is "down enormously" with a "tiny bit of gas
| generation growth". The reality is that overall fossil
| fuel use remains largely the same, coal reductions were
| matched by natural gas increases.
|
| Likewise, CO2 reductions aren't very large, and is still
| above average for EU member states:
| https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-
| maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...
| kragen wrote:
| Nuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources.
|
| Ahead of its time, it was unjustly rejected and persecuted by the
| ignorant masses. Its advocates are bonded by the quiet pride that
| at least _they_ weren 't unthinkingly siding with those masses.
| (And they're right!) Meanwhile, as the Amiga stagnated for
| _terribly unfair_ reasons, other, scrappier technologies like the
| i386 and UMG-Si grew from being worthless boondoggles (except in
| special circumstances, like spaceflight) to being actually far
| better and cheaper. But the Amiga advocates keep the faith,
| sharing their suffering and resentment. They inevitably try the
| alternatives a little and perhaps even start to like them.
| Gradually their denial recedes, decade by decade.
|
| But they know that however much fab costs go down and leave their
| beloved Amiga behind in the dust, you'll never be able to run
| nuclear submarines and Antarctic research stations on solar
| panels.
|
| -- *** --
|
| Wind, where available, undercut the cost of steam power
| (including nuclear and coal) a decade ago, and PV undercut it in
| equatorial parts of the world about four years ago, or in even
| more of the world if you don't include storage. As a result, last
| year, China, whose electrical consumption has doubled in the last
| decade, built 48.2 gigawatts+ of new photovoltaic capacity _last
| year_ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-
| climatechang... but only has, I think, something like 10 GW of
| nuclear plants under construction, scheduled to come online _over
| the next several years_. PV installed capacity in China is
| growing by 23% per year, the same rate it has been growing
| worldwide for the last few years; with some luck that will return
| to the 39%-yearly-worldwide-growth trend that has been the fairly
| consistent average over the last 28 years.++
|
| (A previous version was posted at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218673.)
|
| ______
|
| + China's PV capacity factor seems to be only about 13%, so those
| 48 GWp probably work out to only about 6 GW average. It would be
| nice if China managed to site its new PV plants in places that
| could provide a capacity factor like California's 28%.
|
| ++ Why 28? Because I haven't found figures yet on what worldwide
| installed capacity was in 01992 or earlier.
| Shivetya wrote:
| Construction of nuclear stations in the United States instead
| of getting cheaper as more were built got more expensive but
| what is surprising is a good amount of the costs were because
| of poor project management. [0]
|
| Basically last minute design changes. Having people sitting
| around doing nothing because their skills were not needed at
| the current time. You would have over crowded work areas and
| either insufficient or lack of tools needed to do the work.
|
| Standardization, the same methods by which the price of solar
| panels plummeted could benefit nuclear as well. there is no
| reason as a nation a standardized design could not be created
| and installed with good speed and low costs.
|
| Think of it as a modern day Liberty ship except we are freeing
| ourselves from fossil fuels
|
| [0]https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
| kragen wrote:
| > there is no reason as a nation a standardized design could
| not be created and installed with good speed and low costs.
|
| There is, actually, if by "low costs" we mean lower than
| solar. If you take a nuclear plant and remove the nuclear
| reactor from it, what you have left is a steam-driven
| generator and a firebox where the reactor used to be. That's
| what a coal power plant is. Coal power plants cost about
| twice as much per watt _to build_ as current solar power
| plants, and solar power keeps getting cheaper. So it 's
| unlikely that nuclear power plants will start costing _less_
| -- _to build_ --per watt than coal plants.
|
| (They could of course cost less _to operate_ per watt, since
| they don 't have to buy fuel by the trainload or dispose of
| fly ash. But _just the cost to build_ a coal plant makes it
| uncompetitive with solar in most of the world, unless you
| make very pessimistic assumptions about intermittency and the
| cost of utility-scale energy storage, which is, however,
| still an unknown.)
|
| So, it's even more unlikely that nuclear power will get
| cheaper _than solar power_. Unless you 're in, like, Svalbard
| or something. Or there's a revolutionary new way to build
| supercritical steam turbines that makes them much cheaper per
| watt and isn't also applicable to making solar panels. Steam
| turbines were invented 137 years ago and have been a big
| business central to the economy of every developed country
| for decades, so I'm not holding my breath.
| pan69 wrote:
| > Nuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources. > Ahead of its
| time, it was unjustly rejected and persecuted by the ignorant
| masses.
|
| There is a documentary by Adam Curtis that basically describes
| this scenario (except for the Amiga part).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a0V2JFh6vY
| legulere wrote:
| Your opponents of course seem ignorant if you turn them into
| straw-men.
|
| There are legitimate concerns against nuclear:
|
| Lack of a proper handling of nuclear waste, which is pretty
| much impossible given the timeframe.
|
| Weakness to improper handling. Human error is very common and
| should not be able to lead to catastrophic events.
|
| Weakness to unknown unknowns. Chernobyl and Fukushima haven't
| been predicted, we're not able to see all failure modes.
|
| Usefulness of civilian technology in the spread of nuclear
| weapons. Just think of why the US keeps Iran from building up a
| civilian nuclear industry.
|
| Expensiveness. Cost is mostly bound by construction costs,
| which rose faster than inflation.
| kragen wrote:
| Anti-nuclear activists aren't _my_ opponents. They 're the
| opponents of _Amiga fans_. You know. The people I 'm _making
| fun of_.
|
| > There are legitimate concerns against nuclear:
|
| Yeah, I agree. There were legitimate reasons not to buy an
| Amiga, too: it was expensive, it didn't run WordPerfect or
| Microsoft Flight Simulator, and then it stagnated. Probably
| 20 or 10 years ago the legitimate reasons not to use nuclear
| were less important than global warming.
|
| Now they're irrelevant because nobody is going to use nuclear
| anyway except for things like submarines because it's too
| expensive.
|
| > Chernobyl and Fukushima haven't been predicted
|
| Hmm, are you suggesting (non-gas-cooled) US and UK reactors
| were designed with a negative void coefficient without
| knowing that this was a safety feature? I think that in fact
| Chernobyl _was_ predicted _but happened anyway_. Similarly
| the power company at Fukushima was found guilty of predicting
| the problem and then not preventing it.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| Waste is easily the biggest straw-man concern there is
| against nuclear. The entirety of the nuclear waste produced
| by US nuclear grid electric power generation fits in a volume
| the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. We
| test waster supplies for uranium already because naturally
| occurring uranium sometimes gets into drinking water and it
| has to be filtered out [2].
|
| Burying spent nuclear fuel in bedrock, with no aquifer poses
| zero risk. The only way it's getting out is by deliberate
| human intervention. Any nefarious group that has the
| capability of doing this could inflict far more harm by
| conventional means. And even if it somehow, by some
| mysterious force, leaks into the water supply we have
| infrastructure to detect it and filter it.
|
| We dispose of materials far more toxic than nuclear waste on
| a regular basis.
|
| 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-
| spent-...
|
| 2. https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-
| contaminat...
| effie wrote:
| These "concerns" show lack of understanding of current
| nuclear industry capabilities and realistic undestanding of
| real and potential disasters.
|
| > _Lack of a proper handling of nuclear waste_
|
| "Nuclear waste" handling is very non-lacking since 40's,
| there is no real problem with it. It is a contentious topic
| because NIMBY and because anti-nuclear propaganda, but not a
| real problem that needs to be solved. There is very little of
| such waste. It is already being stored in acceptable way -
| power plants have water pools for the hot stuff and storage
| facilities for the less hot stuff. The hot stuff becomes less
| hot after some time. France has a process in operation for
| converting the waste into glass and storing it safely in
| casks. No, keeping the waste away from people determined to
| dig up spent nuclear fuel for 100000 years isn't a real
| problem that needs to be solved.
|
| > _Weakness to improper handling. Human error is very common
| and should not be able to lead to catastrophic events._
|
| Nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are very small
| when you compare them to other industrial accidents, like
| chemical plants or oil/gas. People are dumb and sometimes
| they cause disasters like these. Many times bigger disasters
| (in terms of deaths, property damage) happen without people
| having a say, like tsunamis, hurricanes, volcano eruptions.
| Nuclear energy is much safer, in terms of deaths per kWh,
| than solar or wind energy.
|
| > _Usefulness of civilian technology in the spread of nuclear
| weapons._
|
| All big countries where more nuclear energy will be most
| important in dropping the CO2 production already have nuclear
| weapons and are not going to get rid of them. Spread of
| nuclear weapons is not a relevant argument against most of
| new nuclear plants, because the weapons are already there.
| kragen wrote:
| > Nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are very
| small when you compare them to other industrial accidents,
| like chemical plants or oil/gas
|
| Hmm, it's been 35 years and Prip'iat' is still uninhabited
| --and, I think, uninhabitable--as part of the 2600-square-
| kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Which chemical-plant or
| oil/gas industrial accidents are you thinking of that have
| rendered 5000 square kilometers uninhabitable for 35 years,
| or rendered 2600 square kilometers uninhabitable for 70
| years? I'm supposing that "very small when you compare"
| implies at least a factor of 2--more likely a factor of 10?
|
| I can't even think of any _major wars_ that have had such
| an effect, although it 's easy to think of wars and
| accidents that have killed more people. Chernobyl killed
| 100 people more or less immediately and several thousand
| more people over the years. The Fukushima accident itself
| has only killed one person so far, but the evacuation (to
| keep people from being killed by radioactivity) killed 2200
| more people.
|
| On the afternoon that Prip'iat' was evacuated in 01986, it
| was the ninth atomgrad; today there are 11 atomgrads in
| Russia (ZATO under the authority of Rosatom), producing 20%
| of Russia's electricity. If we had five times as many
| atomgrads, or if we had as many atomgrads as we have sites
| of chemical plants, how many uninhabitable atomic Exclusion
| Zones would we have by now? Would it be more, or--thanks to
| the extra experience--fewer? Surely some would be smaller
| than Chernobyl's, some larger.
|
| I think there probably would have been a few hundred
| thousand more people dead in such accidents, and a few
| dozen more radioactive nature preserves like the Chernobyl
| zone, before we figured it out, and that would have been
| better than the global-warming catastrophe we were on track
| for a decade ago. For better or worse, though, that wasn't
| the way things went. Instead now we have solar energy
| that's not just cheaper than nuclear but cheaper than coal.
| legulere wrote:
| > current nuclear industry capabilities
|
| If I talked about that I would write way more negatively.
| Olkiluoto 3 is such a shut show for instance.
|
| > there is no real problem with it.
|
| You need to keep it from polluting the environment like the
| ground water, which is very hard to do on a geological
| timescale. Containers can rust or get crushed by forces.
| Not even saline formations are safe from water entry. Also
| you need to stop mishandling like dumping it in the
| Mediterranean like what happen end in Italy in the 80s.
|
| > There is very little of such waste.
|
| 1 kg per capita per year like in France is not very little.
| And they don't have any permanent storage location for
| that.
|
| > Nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are very
| small when you compare them to other industrial accidents,
| like chemical plants or oil/gas.
|
| Which industrial accident has turned multiple hundreds to
| thousands of square kilometers into exclusion zones for
| decades of not centuries?
|
| And we have been lucky that those accidents happened in
| relatively uninhabited areas.
|
| > Nuclear energy is much safer, in terms of deaths per kWh,
| than solar or wind energy.
|
| That's both wrong and irrelevant as lack of deaths are just
| one aspect of safety.
|
| > All big countries where more nuclear energy will be most
| important in dropping the CO2 production already have
| nuclear weapons
|
| The world is not just 8 countries. Especially Africa will
| play a huge role when its population will get wealthier and
| consume more.
| einrealist wrote:
| Yeah, and lets just ignore the waste and emissions that it
| generates at all other fronts (building the plant and materials
| for it, mining and processing of the fuel, processing and storage
| of spend fuel, disassembly of the plant). "_Clean_" nuclear
| energy is and will always be a fairy tale!
|
| Edit: Emphasized the word "Clean". I am not per se against
| Nuclear. Anyway, keep downvoting my opinion.
| dudul wrote:
| Taking your other fronts into account, what is a clean energy?
| sesuximo wrote:
| Beggars can't be choosers. We have a lot of constraints and not
| a lot of options.
| sand500 wrote:
| Coal energy puts out more radioactivity into the atmosphere
| than nuclear power.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
| politician wrote:
| Learn about Small Modular Reactors
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yofGtxEgpI8
| biren34 wrote:
| In modern politics, you simply cannot defend your left flank
| cthalupa wrote:
| Easily outweighed by the savings in emissions over the lifetime
| of the plant.
|
| Generation 3 and 3 "Advanced" reactors already generate
| significantly less waste than the Gen2 reactors that make up
| the majority in operation. Generation 4 reactors are in the
| design phase (some with proven technology, others with
| technology that is scientifically sound in theory but need some
| additional advances made) that reduce it by even larger
| amounts.
|
| Even Gen2 reactors with all their faults over their lifetime
| are a huge net win over coal and gas fired power plants.
|
| Producing photovoltaic panels generates tons of waste, as well,
| much of it quite toxic to humans and generally bad for the
| environment. Even building wind turbines isn't a perfectly
| clean task.
|
| Our primary problem at this point is carbon emissions. Nuclear
| is a very viable option for significantly reducing them even at
| current technology levels, and with huge strides on the way.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| I'd be interested in seeing information that counters the
| features of the 'Generation IV' nuclear reactors[0]. Among
| other promises, they purportedly can consume existing waste
| from Generation I-III reactors, and reduce the total nuclear
| waste on the planet, rather than increasing it.
|
| Some purported advantages (there are different technologies):
|
| - Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries
| instead of millennia
|
| - 100-300 times more energy yield from the same amount of
| nuclear fuel
|
| - Broader range of fuels, and even un-encapsulated raw fuels
| (non-pebble MSR, LFTR).
|
| - In some reactors, the ability to consume existing nuclear
| waste in the production of electricity, that is, a closed
| nuclear fuel cycle. This strengthens the argument to deem
| nuclear power as renewable energy.
|
| - Improved operating safety features, such as (depending on
| design) avoidance of pressurized operation, automatic passive
| (unpowered, uncommanded) reactor shutdown, avoidance of water
| cooling and the associated risks of loss of water (leaks or
| boiling) and hydrogen generation/explosion and contamination of
| coolant water.
|
| Any information filling out this picture is appreciated.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| I upvoted because a lot of people feel the way you do and those
| of us with pro-nuclear views should practice making our case
| constructively.
|
| And because I don't like my contrarian views to be silenced,
| either.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > building the plant and materials for it, mining and
| processing of the fuel, processing and storage of spend fuel,
| disassembly of the plant
|
| All of these things are currently far more severe with
| photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. Per unit of energy,
| nuclear is _far_ kinder to the Earth on all of these fronts.
|
| > Anyway, keep downvoting my opinion.
|
| If you insist.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Think of the scale of those emissions and you realize they are
| insignificant.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| > Clean nuclear energy is and will always be a fairy tale!
|
| What type of energy is "clean"?
| phtevus wrote:
| Wrong - please do your research and fight ignorance.
| asoneth wrote:
| I don't think many people consider nuclear "clean", certainly
| no conversation I've ever seen has ignored the waste or the
| other immense lifecycle costs, and if we had enough time left
| I'd be all for focusing on transitioning solely to renewables.
|
| But of all the realistic options left on the table ones that
| include some amount of nuclear baseload seem the least bad.
| insert_coin wrote:
| When you find out the real impact even a day of your life has
| on the planet you are gonna flip out. The mining required to
| keep you alive is going to drive you nuts.
| kergonath wrote:
| > lets just ignore the waste and emissions that it generates at
| all other fronts (building the plant and materials for it,
| mining and processing of the fuel, processing and storage of
| spend fuel, disassembly of the plant)
|
| Because of course wind turbines just appear by themselves and
| don't need steel, concrete, composites, and, well, turbines
| (with the associated material sourcing and recycling issues).
| And solar panels are just picked on trees and do not need any
| fabrication.
|
| The overall carbon impact for the different energy sources are
| well known. Solar is slightly worse and nuclear and wind are
| even. All three are orders of magnitude better than any fossil
| fuel.
| guscost wrote:
| Now _this_ is the only way to get my stubborn libertarian ass on
| board with a more "green" agenda.
|
| I remain suspicious that it is bullshit, though, since the
| nuclear industry doesn't employ a lot of voters.
| epistasis wrote:
| I support including nuclear here too, simply because nuclear is
| only useful in a culture war.
|
| New nuclear is a complete financial boondoggle. I'm always
| surprised to find any libertarian support for it however, as
| nuclear is the project of big government. It requires massive
| financial insurance that only governments are willing to
| provide. And in the US, it has been such a financial disaster
| that utilities run far away from nuclear for fear of
| bankruptcy. The only way that we started two new nuclear
| construction projects in the mid 2000s was because the state
| legislature was bought off, and allowed utility monopolies to
| charge customers for the construction of the project whether or
| not it finished, completly socializing the financial risks of
| construction through government force. And in South Carolina,
| the after spending $9B of utility rate payer money, the project
| was abandoned as in feasible to complete.
|
| So the libertarian support for nuclear always has me completely
| puzzled. Without government coercion, it would never get built
| again. But then, I'm the complete opposite of a libertarian, so
| I'm probably misunderstanding something of the motivation. I
| would be interested to hear how a libertarian could support a
| new nuclear project.
| guscost wrote:
| Insurance is what cripples these projects financially, and
| the insurance rates are based on a woeful misunderstanding of
| the risks, driven by media fear-mongering about Fukushima and
| other passive-safe reactors. The bad PR is probably assisted
| by oil companies - Friends of the Earth was originally funded
| by an oil baron[0].
|
| But if you would rather fall back on hydrocarbon energy for
| baseline power, and pray to Elon for magic batteries someday,
| feel free to vote the other way.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Orville_Anderson
| triceratops wrote:
| > the insurance rates are based on a woeful
| misunderstanding of the risks
|
| Any self-respecting libertarian would call that a market
| opportunity. If you're right, there's a lot of money to be
| made insuring nuclear plants.
| [deleted]
| epistasis wrote:
| I've been following nuclear closely and never found a
| single project that was stopped due to insurance. The
| government is eager to provide that.
|
| Further, so say that the insurance is _wrong_ on its
| numbers seems fairly fantastical, can you provide a an
| example of a site where the insurance has been based on bad
| values?
|
| But all this is ignoring the primary problem with nuclear:
| its too expensive and not a good fit for the productive
| capacity of our economy.
|
| The PR side of it is the mere culture war. PR isn't
| stopping new projects, at least not in the US. There are
| plenty of sites here that would welcome the economic
| activity.
|
| I am still curious as to how libertarian ideology is
| compatible with nuclear power, either as it currently
| exists, or as some other form not yet realized. Is it just
| in opposition to organizations like Friends of the Earth in
| the culture war, or is there some aspect of nuclear in
| particular?
|
| Also, I find it very strange to call batteries "magic" when
| they are one of the easiest and quickest grid technologies
| to deploy, and are seeing absolutely massive market growth
| because they have reached the tipping point of being cost
| efficient compared to alternatives. Make an order, lay down
| a concrete slab, plug the shipping containers into the
| grid. I guess that could seem "magical" but they are very
| real and very easy. And Tesla is far from the only battery
| producer, they're only the best showmen.
| lampe3 wrote:
| we need to think how to warn our successors that this place they
| are entering is deadly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-
| time_nuclear_waste_warnin... or google: Nuclear semiotics
| effie wrote:
| No, that is a completely artificial academic problem.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Why is fusion ignored?
| jtolmar wrote:
| The biggest problem with fission power is up front capital
| cost. It takes so long to pay off the mortgage that, by the
| time a nuclear plant pulls ahead over a fossil fuel plant,
| whoever decided to build that plant is probably getting ready
| to retire.
|
| We have every reason to believe that a fusion power plant will
| be even more expensive and slower to construct than a fission
| one. So, even if you skipped over the additional expensive and
| slow step of proving that a reactor design works, they still
| wouldn't be chosen by any energy company that expects to turn a
| profit.
| king_magic wrote:
| Because it doesn't exist yet?
| cthalupa wrote:
| In this article, or in general? For this article, because it's
| just not going to arrive in time to solve the main issue. I'm
| extremely optimistic about ITER, but the current timetable on
| ITER/DEMO doesn't have an operating poc plant until the 2050s.
|
| If you mean in general, it's not even remotely ignored. There
| are massive projects underway (see the previously mentioned
| ITER) as well as smaller, more experimental projects. It's a
| very exciting field to follow. It just doesn't move fast enough
| to solve problems that we needed to solve a decade ago.
|
| We're in damage control mode when it comes to climate change,
| deaths from emissions, etc. We can't afford to wait for a
| perfect solution when we're bleeding out in the field.
| rossnordby wrote:
| If anyone's not already aware of it, the SPARC/ARC reactor
| work spun out of MIT looks pretty promising on shorter
| timescales than ITER:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8uYNhevRtk
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Stuff like this is what got me excited about fusion. Energy
| is the most fundamental constraint of the universe and
| people like MIT's Zach Hartwig say fusion merely has a
| funding problem.
| effie wrote:
| > fusion merely has a funding problem.
|
| When you look at history of ITER failures and the real
| problems involved in making the whole fusion power
| production operation economically sustainable, this claim
| disintegrates. It is a very complex project that is hard
| to manage, and building and operating fusion power plant
| is currently much more costly than doing that for a
| fission power plant. The only benefit of fusion vs.
| fission is that fusion can give us much more energy. But
| fission can give enough energy now for decades, and much
| more cheaply.
| rossnordby wrote:
| It's worth distinguishing ITER from fusion research as a
| whole. While it's an interesting project, I doubt it's
| going to be first to market for actual power generation.
| Its design is fighting some pretty nasty scaling laws
| that newer research is bypassing.
|
| I wouldn't advocate shutting down fission plants with the
| expectation that they'd be replaced by fusion in the
| immediate future, obviously, but some of the non-ITER
| work might end up viable sooner than a lot of people
| expect.
| effie wrote:
| Fusion is not a real power plant technology and won't be at
| least for few decades, probably much longer.
| sand500 wrote:
| Because it is always 50 years out.
| drran wrote:
| Why is the LENR ignored then?
| cthalupa wrote:
| Because at least regular fusion has significant and
| universally accepted empirical evidence of it even being
| fundamentally possible.
|
| LENR has had to have a name change because the primary
| connotation with cold fusion is a bunch of psuedoscience
| and bullshit.
|
| Yes, some real scientists have published some results that
| make continued study worthwhile, but if regular fusion is
| 50 years off, our indication is that LENR, if it's even
| possible, is 100.
| drran wrote:
| Why 100? I see no barrier to adopt the LENR worldwide in
| a short period of time, when the effect will be well
| understood and easy to reproduce.
| cthalupa wrote:
| If people outside of the LENR community could ever
| reproduce any of their experiments it would be a good
| start.
|
| I don't think the hundred or so scientists at a bunch of
| disparate universities are part of some conspiracy to
| push quack science, but something is up when there is no
| theoretical framework that even begins to explain your
| results, no one outside of your community can reproduce
| it, and your results are still just "well that's weird"
| vs. "we have something we can build off to actually
| produce energy"
| drran wrote:
| When someone outside the LENR community will reproduce
| Cold Fusion experiment, he will be part of the LENR
| community immedialtely, so nope.
|
| However, you can look at results produced by Akito
| Takahashi[0]. Are they convincing enough for you?
|
| [0]: https://www.lenr-
| canr.org/acrobat/BiberianJPjcondensedzb.pdf...
| zamalek wrote:
| Have those results been replicated by a peer?
| drran wrote:
| This is the replication of results of Mitsubishi Heavy
| Industries experiments.
| the8472 wrote:
| If all you want is fusion instead of energy production
| then just put a fusor[0] in your garage.
|
| Lab results that show some evidence for trace amounts of
| fusion reactions do not imply net energy production. E.g.
| one of the recently announced results needed a powerful
| xray beamline to get some tiny results, which consumed
| more energy than the fusion reactions ever released.
|
| This is comparable to the ancient greeks inventing a
| "steam engine"[1] that does no meaningful work.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
| drran wrote:
| Unlike fission and like thermal pump, this energy can be
| used to heat buildings, so even if nuclear reaction can
| produce just 100-200% of additional energy, which is
| enough for about 30-60% of electricity spent, the device
| still can perform at 200-300% efficiency when used as a
| home heater.
| the8472 wrote:
| In that case it would compete with a heat pump. And
| unlike that one it can't double as AC.
|
| And that's not exactly baseline power production.
| Shifting goalposts?
| kergonath wrote:
| Oh, you again? It's ignored because it's bunk.
| drran wrote:
| It's ignored, because most labs in the world cannot
| reproduce it yet, because LENR is not well understood
| yet. However, LENR is not dismissed completely, see [0].
|
| My own idea is that plasma micro-bubbles are hot enough
| to cause nuclear fusion somehow.
|
| [0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/scientists-
| in-the-u...
| zamalek wrote:
| Because nobody has demonstrated working LENR. You can't
| build that which has not been discovered. Oil wars are
| effectively fought over energy. LENR would be a significant
| strategic, political, and economical advantage, and
| intentionally suppressing it is equivalent to shooting
| yourself in the foot. America, as one example, could stop
| participating in an expensive war occurring thousands of
| kilometers away over an ocean, that is being fought for the
| sole purpose of stockpiling energy reserves.
|
| We know how to make fission reactors, we have many of them
| operating right now. We could build more this very second.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Probably because it's still decades away from being a cost-
| effective, break-even source of power.
| beders wrote:
| Solar is now the cheapest form of energy. Ever.
|
| Before you try to sink billions into nuclear energy, explain why
| we can't do it with solar + storage alone? Just one good reason.
| I've yet to hear anything substantive. All I keep hearing is
| soundbites from the nuclear and fossil fuel industry.
|
| All is missing is the political will, not technology.
|
| Use nuclear for situations in which there are no alternatives.
| Rovers on Mars or something.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| > Before you try to sink billions into nuclear energy, explain
| why we can't do it with solar + storage alone? Just one good
| reason. I've yet to hear anything substantive.
|
| The fact that storage at anywhere remotely close to the
| required scale doesn't exist is a very good reason.
| Slikey wrote:
| Not just that solar is the cheapest but nuclear is also the
| second most expensive option. I really don't understand this
| recent flood of pro-nuclear posts on HN.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
| jpxw wrote:
| I don't think we have efficient enough storage (yet ?), do we?
|
| Can I get a source on solar being the cheapest energy source?
| That surprises me
| notJim wrote:
| Suppose nuclear requires various government supports to make
| the projects economically viable and in research for new
| reactor designs. Now suppose we put that same money into
| subsidizing renewables, and building a modern grid. Which one
| gives a better result?
|
| Edit: to add an even spicier question, why not keep
| renewables + natural gas with carbon capture?
| godelski wrote:
| Depends. Are we talking battery needs for the Southwest? Yes.
| Other places that don't have a relatively constant solar
| output and more variable seasons? No. But this is one of the
| many reasons the situation is substantially more complicated
| than the general conversation.
| notJim wrote:
| > Other places that don't have a relatively constant solar
| output and more variable seasons? No.
|
| How big of a problem is this really, though? We could run
| more HVDC lines (as we already have in some places), such
| that sunny states provide power to northern states in the
| winter.
| godelski wrote:
| I don't actually know the answer. I do know that there
| isn't a singular grid in the US though so there are some
| complications. From my limited understanding the Texas
| power problem wouldn't have been solved if ERCOT was
| connected to the western or eastern grids. We're also
| talking about big losses if we're transmitting
| electricity across the country. There's also political
| issues as well as security issues (don't put all your
| eggs in one basket and don't putt all your baskets in the
| same place).
| titzer wrote:
| Sure. Just tell me where you are going to put all those solar
| panels now. On house roofs? In cities? Sounds great. In the
| desert? Count me out. We are going to cover this planet in tech
| junk like it's Blade Runner 2049. That's not a future I want to
| see. I like the deserts the way they are.
| godelski wrote:
| > All is missing is the political will, not technology.
|
| I hate this phrase and it is something both the "only
| renewables" and "only nuclear" camps make. Neither technology
| is developed enough to effectively take over the grid (plus one
| source is terrible for energy security, but renewables is a bit
| diversified, though you're arguing purely solar).
|
| The technical problem here is that we do not yet have the
| battery technology to sustain the grid. These are not the same
| batteries that we have in our cellphones. You cannot quick
| discharge common lipo batteries without starting a fire. But
| including batteries completely changes the cost structure and
| environmental impact which is why many suggest baseload
| technologies like hydro (nuclear would fit in here as well but
| yes, it is costly). This also creates a drastically different
| cost function for places like the American Southwest vs the
| American Northeast.
|
| There is missing political will, but there is also missing
| technology (and missing political will to fund the development
| of that technology).
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Finally we're starting to make some headway. Keep the ones we
| have running (as long as they are legitimately safe) and
| quintuple the current number and we'll be off to a good start
| with clean energy. Also up the solar, wind, and offshore wind as
| well as incentives to switch to electrivity
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