[HN Gopher] Is nuclear power our best bet against climate change?
___________________________________________________________________
Is nuclear power our best bet against climate change?
Author : gumby
Score : 243 points
Date : 2021-10-16 21:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bostonreview.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (bostonreview.net)
| tejohnso wrote:
| How could it be our best bet? I hope not.
|
| It does nothing to reduce the consumption frenzy, and it does
| nothing to remove CO2 / CH4 from the atmosphere, and it does
| nothing to reduce insolation.
|
| Something like the MEER:ReflEction project[1] seems to be more
| appropriate to me.
|
| [1]: https://www.meerreflection.com/home
| defterGoose wrote:
| It can cleanly (zero excess carbon) provide vast amounts of
| energy for direct air capture of CO2 (energy is the biggest
| barrier for that).
|
| The efforts proposed in the site you linked require huge
| geological-scale engineering efforts never before attempted.
| Nuclear is really here and it works well the overwhelmingly
| vast majority of the time.
|
| Don't get me wrong, changing mindsets and reducing consumptive
| behavior are at the root of the problem as well, just remember
| that 'perfect' is the enemy of 'good'.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The most enduring product of any nuclear power project is not
| radioactive waste, but corruption. Nuclear power construction
| projects, at least in the western world, invariably become
| conduits for wholly legal, long-term corruption, making nukes
| about the most expensive kind of power (ignoring externalities
| from coal). This is a common feature of big-ticket public-works
| projects, particularly also including tunnel projects and
| military procurement.
|
| Nukes take so long to build not because it is so hard to do -- it
| is mostly just concrete and plumbing -- but because nobody
| actually involved wants the construction money _ever_ to stop
| flowing. No output is even promised for years, which is easily
| stretched out, often beyond a decade. Sunk-cost fallacy helps
| this process: once a few $B are burned, it is easy to unlock more
| against the prospect of admitting what was already spent bought
| nothing.
|
| As bad as is the corruption around fission, fusion has been and
| must be much worse. A fission plant is expected to produce power
| eventually, or the plug will finally be pulled. One recent
| fission failure has cost $30B, so far, which seems like a lot,
| but fusion has burned more already without even breaking ground
| on a plant. ITER, even if 100% successful, will generate zero
| watts: no turbines are in the site plan. A plant built after it
| would cost, conservatively, >$50B and take decades to finish.
| (The most likely outcome would be that it is _never_ finished.)
| Meanwhile, the costs of solar, wind, and storage are still
| plummeting, with no hint of a lower limit.
|
| Thus far wind and solar have mostly avoided becoming conduits for
| corruption, probably because it is easy to see how the money is
| spent, and maybe because of the high fraction of idealists
| involved. (The exception is solar thermal.) Power can begin
| flowing almost immediately, after a small fraction of the whole
| installation is done, which can then fund further construction.
| Thus, the up-front capital needed is small, and costs are
| constrained by immediate revenue.
|
| Thus, every penny diverted to fission and fusion (not to mention
| feeding and maintaining coal) from solar and wind brings climate
| catastrophe ever nearer.
| danny_codes wrote:
| This seems pretty naive to me. Big public works projects are
| big so they take a lot of time and money. Of course there's
| political overhead and graft, etc. However, I'd argue that
| doesn't really matter.
|
| Let's say it costs $10 billion to build a nuclear plant
| producing ~2 GWatts (something about what has costed
| historically). This includes all the graft and corruption of
| which you speak.
|
| We need around 500 of them (need ~1 TWatt) to replace all
| existing electric power generation for a total cost of $5
| trillion. Financed over 15 years that's $50 billion a year (~8%
| increase in federal spending).
|
| So really who cares if public works projects are inefficient?
| For a modest tax increase (or modest debt increase) we're done
| with primary energy-production related emissions.
|
| Added benefit is we can almost certainly export our now
| resurgent and world-leading fission power plants around the
| world. This would (a) solve a big part of the climate change
| problem (b) make America look good, particularly if we provide
| fission technology at-cost (c) position us as a technology
| leader in the sustainable/renewable energy sector.
|
| As a sidenote, it's also VERY likely that building 500
| hopefully identical power plants would drive costs down
| significantly. Numbers given are worst-case.
| ncmncm wrote:
| That price is at least 5x solar+wind+storage.
|
| I estimate 3/4 the cost of a nuke plant (when it gets
| finished at all) is graft. Besides the waste, it enriches
| crooks who go on to poison public decision making. That is
| how we got where we are now.
|
| It costs more just to operate and maintain an _existing_ nuke
| than to build out new solar. That is why they are being
| retired, and new projects are cancelled. Their power gets
| less competitive with every day that passes.
| danny_codes wrote:
| > That price is at least 5x solar+wind+storage. Do you have
| a source? This seems.. unlikely to be true.
|
| As for your point on graft, you seem to have a very
| black/white view of government. I find, in general, that
| black/white views are usually wrong quite often, since very
| few things are black/white. While I'm sure we can point to
| many examples of big public works projects that were
| debacles, certainly there are many examples which have
| turned out quite well. An immediate assumption that any
| large public works project will turn out badly is, I think,
| naive.
| ncmncm wrote:
| We have many decades of experience with, specifically,
| nukes. If any were not debacles, we would be hearing
| about them. (They have, though, enriched certain people.)
|
| I do indeed have a black/white view on graft: _I am
| against it_. Your argument in its favor is not
| persuasive. Your argument for nukes on the back of that
| is no more so.
| PostOnce wrote:
| ITER isn't a commercial project. It's a multinational research
| project.
|
| You're basically saying "research is corruption because it
| isn't _guaranteed_ to produce a result ", well, if it was, it
| wouldn't be research.
|
| The plan for fusion: First, prove it can work. Then, worry
| about commercialization and cost reduction after we know it
| works.
|
| You're also glossing over the fact that if fusion works, it
| solves a lot of problems other renewables don't: density,
| reliability (at night, on a still day, etc), possibly cost
| overall. Probably more, I'm no expert.
| ncmncm wrote:
| ITER is a research project that is costing more than a full-
| scale commercial production fission plant.
|
| There is much that nobody knows about getting fusion working.
| What we can be confident about is that if ever made to work,
| it will cost way more than a fission plant of equal capacity.
| Fission is itself not competitive today, and gets less so
| every day.
|
| A>B>C => A>C
|
| Is this logic hard to follow? Cost of fusion is unknown, but
| already very large. Cost of renewables is known, small, and
| reliably decreasing.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| This is a key point.
|
| The US especially needs to solve the construction generates
| corruption problem before it can have sane nuclear power.
|
| It needs to do this for public transit as well. But the thing
| with solar is you can ramp it up and then worry about how to
| store the cyclical excess and this means you can make the
| storage mechanism competitive.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| It's too late to fight emissions. It's time to build flood
| defenses and irrigation systems and move cities north...
| redisman wrote:
| Why not both
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| You're being downvoted, but I think there is some truth to what
| you are saying:
|
| 1. Humans have shown time and again that they simply aren't
| capable of the global wide self-sacrifice that would be
| required _now_ to prevent the worst effects of climate change.
| Just look at a chart for global greenhouse gas emissions over
| time. The only time you even see a _slight_ reduction is when
| there is a massive global recession or pandemic. We basically
| need about "2 or 3 pandemics-worth" of reductions _annually_
| to hit our goals. This just isn 't going to happen.
|
| 2. That said, I think it _will_ be possible to transition over
| to primarily renewables, but the main driver for this will be
| economic (solar and batteries are continuing to plummet in
| price). It will just take a long time (or, at least, longer
| than we really have) before this increase in renewables really
| starts to dent CO2 emissions. Thus, I think maintaining a focus
| on emissions is a good thing, because it will still help that
| transition to renewables happen faster.
|
| 3. Your second sentence is absolutely true though. I think at
| least a 3 meter sea level rise by 2100 is pretty unavoidable by
| now, and that will have a massive impact on coastal cities.
| Significant impacts from climate change are unavoidable at this
| point, so we should start planning for this.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Regarding reserves, the article makes the usual mistake of taking
| currently known and cheap sources as definite. But consider how
| Mad Max came out in the late 1970s, when the fear of completely
| running out of oil was evident to everyone. And yet, we have now
| found so much more oil that we have to force ourselves to stop
| using it.
|
| We haven't been looking for more uranium simply because there is
| no need for it. The known _cheap_ reserves are barely tapped. And
| there are many known sites that are simply not tapped yet because
| the aforementioned ones are just so cheap. If there was a need
| for more, prospecting would be profitable and would be done.
|
| (As an aside, taking uranium out of sea water is almost certainly
| never going to be worth it.)
|
| And the same applies to thorium or fast breeder reactors. They're
| just not worth the effort at this time. But again, if the demand
| was there, it would take just 10 years to build them.
| envengineer wrote:
| See above comment about radioactive mining waste. More mining,
| more waste. Forever. Of course, it's not in all the proponents
| back yards.
| antattack wrote:
| History of accidents, design flaws, shortcuts taken during
| construction show that we are not ready for Nuclear Power.
| lettergram wrote:
| The obvious answer is no, because we likely cannot stop climate
| change. We're exiting an ice age (the natural state of the world
| is no massive ice sheets), we don't know the actual causes of
| climate change, and even if we believe we know what causes
| climate change (say, carbon), most of the green house gas
| emissions aren't from energy production.
|
| That said, nuclear is likely better for the environment. I'm very
| bullish on nuclear.
| melling wrote:
| Imagine if the United States had gotten 80% of its electricity
| from nuclear over the past 4 decades.
|
| China might have adopted it instead of coal.
|
| We'd been talking about the danger of climate change in 2150.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Aren't the biggest greenhouse gas polluters concrete
| manufacturing and container ships though?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Wouldn't that be the people who buy products shipped from
| overseas and those who buy buildings made with concrete
| instead of wood and brick?
|
| That's the problem with an economy in which there is a
| circular flow of commodities.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > people who buy products shipped from overseas
|
| Container shipping is pretty efficient. I found this quote:
|
| > A big ship will emit about 0.4 ounces of carbon dioxide
| to transport 2 tons of cargo 1 mile. That's roughly half as
| much as a train, one-fifth as much as a truck and nearly a
| fiftieth of what an airplane would emit to accomplish the
| same task.
|
| For CO2 emissions, container shipping from Shenzhen to Long
| Beach by ship is about the same as Bloomington, IL to Long
| Beach by truck.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Good point! Just because there is a concentration of some
| activity in one part of the flow of commodities doesn't
| mean that the activity is inefficient.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Container shipping accounts for ~2.2% of CO2 emissions:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_shipp.
| ..
|
| You're probably thinking of _other_ emissions. They burn
| heavy fuel oil, so they emit a lot of sulfur.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Couldn't you just build nuclear powered container ships?
|
| The biggest reason nuclear powered shipping isn't mainstream
| is because many countries have local policies to prohibit
| nuclear vessels from docking.
|
| If the major powers coordinated they could force the minor
| powers into cooperation. If a country like New Zealand
| refuses to let nuclear ships dock at their local ports, then
| simply throw them out of the WTO. They'd have no other option
| but to change their irrational anti-nuclear policies.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Ships sink at the rate of about 10 per year, and there are
| on the order of 80,000 large commercial cargo vessels in
| the world's trade fleets.
|
| About 1/3 of that is dedicated to the movement of
| hydrocarbons themselves (mostly bulk crude oil, but also
| natural gas, coal, and refined products).
|
| The total military nuclear fleet is on the order of 500
| vessels, and actually accounts for the overwhelming
| majority of nuclear reactors in operation.
|
| Sea lanes are not distributed evenly over the oceans, but
| are concentrated along a limited number of high-traffic
| routes, notably between China, the Straits of Malaca, Gulf
| of Aden, Suez, and Mediterranian, between western Europe
| and the Americas, and from the west coast of the US to
| Japan and China, by way of the Aleutian Islands (great
| circle route).
|
| Odds of hull losses in coastal waters near fishing grounds
| and shore habitation are high. Piracy and other activities
| are another risk.
|
| I'm wondering how the headlines following a decrepit
| nuclear-powered bulk carrier discovered to be carrying a
| cargo of poorly-loaded ammonium nitrate, blowing up
| somewhere in the Medierannian, South China Sea, or
| Singapore, and dirty-bombing the hell out of a few thousand
| square kilometres will read.
|
| ty TY
| beeboop wrote:
| To be fair, there are a _lot_ of countries that I would not
| trust to build safe nuclear ships. There 'd need to be a
| shitload of regulation around the building of these ships.
| Aachen wrote:
| The vast majority of the time they'd not be on shore
| though. If, on first rollout, we notice a number of them
| melting down at sea...
|
| Until then I'd not want to kill the idea without giving
| it a chance.
| jlelse wrote:
| But nuclear meltdowns would have killed a lot of people and
| made a lot of land uninhabitable.
| jedimastert wrote:
| More than coal has? Honestly, I kinda doubt it.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Coal burning literally releases more radiation into the
| environment than nuclear power would.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| True, but utterly irrelevant.
|
| Quantities of radiation released by coal plants under
| normal operations are not a health concern. Coal has
| plenty of other health, and environmental, concerns.
|
| Quanities of radiation released by a coal plant are
| unlikely to vary much at all, no matter how critically
| mismanaged the plant might be.
|
| Quantities of radiation emitted by a badly-mismanaged,
| sabotaged, or attacked nuclear power plant, on the other
| hand, become a health concern for people across
| continents and beyond, as with Chernobyl and Fukushima.
|
| (Note that "concern" need not mean "realised risk", but
| given that one of the characteristics of nuclear
| incidents to date has been inaccurate or misleading
| information on precisely the levels of risk presented,
| _prudence and caution_ strongly recommends presuming a
| worst case until otherwise conclusively demonstrated.)
|
| ty TY
| [deleted]
| jlelse wrote:
| Of course, coal kills a lot of people. But instead of
| investing the money in nuclear power plants, one could also
| build wind/hydro power plants and solar plants...
| onepointsixC wrote:
| And have no scalable storage technology other than
| running natural gas turbines to stablize the grid. No
| thanks.
| unknownOrigin wrote:
| The difference in deaths and severe effects on health and
| ecology is incomparable. Coal absolutely dwarfs nuclear.
| Like hundreds or thousands to one. Even if a Chernobyl
| happened twice a year, like it or not, the resulting
| pollution and death would be less than what coal mining and
| coal power plants do. THAT is the reality people don't want
| to admit because the anti-nuclear propaganda and
| scaremongering has worked so well.
|
| (All of which gets kinda exposed when there's opposition
| also to fusion, so many nay sayers, and it won't work this,
| and it takes 40 years that... also, I swear, if I'm going
| to see one more "fusion reactor in the sky" tweet from
| Elon, my head's gonna explode. Dirtbag manipulator.)
| beeboop wrote:
| There is no evidence for this and it's baseless speculation
| at best.
| Hokusai wrote:
| Oil Buddhists will have have allowed that. The dangers of
| greenhouse gases was already there, and it did not matter. It
| has caused wars and the rise of authoritarian governments, and
| it did not matter. When money is the main motivator for a
| country it's impossible to do what is good for the long term.
| smell-my-bacon wrote:
| So what truly matters to the Oil Buddhists?
| gumby wrote:
| To become one with the atmosphere?
| smell-my-bacon wrote:
| My carbon to your carbon, my gas to your gas...
| Hokusai wrote:
| Business, but I'm also curious now.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > We'd been talking about the danger of climate change in 2150.
|
| More importantly, people would be terrified of fossil fuel
| production. Spills, mining accidents, radioactive pollution
| (yes, coal puts out more radioactive pollution than does a
| nuclear power plant), particulate-related respiratory diseases,
| and so forth.
|
| To think that people are afraid of nuclear energy is just
| crazy, I cannot comprehend how nuclear is perceived dangerous
| yet fossil fuels are somehow not.
| agumonkey wrote:
| To me it's always about the lack of control.
|
| A nuclear plant failure, I'm faced with something I can do
| nothing about. Coal .. well unless our case of whole-plane-
| pollution .. you can mitigate.
|
| Same for cars vs planes. In a plane, I delegate my life to
| stats. Anything happens, I can do nothing about. My car.. I
| can always use slower, lighter roads, keep larger safety
| distance. Even if the odds of car crash are higher. (also if
| I were to drive alone in the midwest, my crash stats would
| probably be as high as planes.. density is a factor it seems)
| ericmay wrote:
| I think it's more of an illusion of control... you can
| control your car to some extent like choosing flights that
| might have better weather that day or something but
| ultimately nobody thinks they'll be a statistic until they
| are. Plenty of people die choosing lower traffic roads too.
| agumonkey wrote:
| If you drive slow alone the chance of fatal crash are
| near zero. Slow, not mildly fast.
|
| When you're in the plane you have zero options. You don't
| even have a parachute. I just don't get it :)
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| >I cannot comprehend how nuclear is perceived dangerous yet
| fossil fuels are somehow not
|
| [0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
| jpalomaki wrote:
| People are more afraid of clearly defined risks (local
| nuclear plant goes boom) than more abstract risks (slowly
| developing health issues due to air pollution). (Can't find
| citation, this was likely mentioned in book Freakonomics)
|
| This is likely built into us through evolution. Natural
| selection has rewarded quick choices over analyzing and
| thinking probabilities.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think it has to do with how humans are wired; slow burning
| dangers don't seem to be registered the same way that nuclear
| fallout and the dread of meltdowns as one big catastrophe
| are.
| [deleted]
| xyzzyz wrote:
| China did adopt nuclear. They are building 15 nuclear power
| plants right now, more than anyone else in the world, and
| almost a third of all the plants under construction. It's just
| their needs grow very, very fast, so they make it up with coal.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Meanwhile Californians will tell us to manage power and power
| cuts.
|
| I can't get behind this agenda. It's infuriating to see the
| west considering itself done. It's in the name "Developed",
| past tense. No need to develop anymore. We've thrown in the
| towel, large swaths of people are against population growth
| and against progress.
| adventured wrote:
| > large swaths of people are against population growth and
| against progress
|
| Population growth is largely irrelevant unless you're
| really facing an extinction path (which we're very far
| from). The standard of living that can be delivered for
| people is what matters.
|
| Modestly fewer people with increased standards of living is
| a very nice outcome for most nations. Some nations are
| drastically overpopulated in terms of density for their
| available space and resources (eg India, China). If you're
| in a more affluent context, having four or more children is
| not a blessing for most people. Raising two children well
| is a quite difficult and life-consuming task, even if one
| parent stays home full-time. It makes perfect sense that
| affluent populations would choose to reproduce at a lower
| rate. It's rational.
|
| That said it's certainly disheartening to see the lack of
| spirit of seeking progress that used to widely exist in the
| West. It's still there, faintly, diminished.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Most economists think that population decline is tightly
| coupled with the economy. It may be rational in
| individual sense, but as a society, it is pretty much a
| bad idea.
|
| I suggest further reading:
| https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
| economics/2021/03/27/t...
|
| That said, overpopulation is also a problem. In a
| resource rich nation, it is never a problem.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Most economists think that population decline is
| tightly coupled with the economy
|
| To be fair, what "mosts economists think" tends to have
| fairly weak empirical support on purely matters that are
| purely internal to the narrow sense of the economy, and
| it only gets worse on economic connections to broader
| social phenomena. (And that's not even counting overtly
| ideological schools of economics like Austrian economics,
| where beliefs aren't even _in principal_ empirically
| grounded.)
|
| OTOH, there's a reasonably strong case to be made that
| reduced incentive for population growth is an effect of
| strong social saftey nets.
| delecti wrote:
| From what I can tell from a quick google search, China has
| over 1000 coal plants, and is building almost 200 more [2].
| The fact that China is building 15 nuclear plants instead of
| 150 feels like they're only dipping their toes into nuclear,
| not fully adopting it.
|
| And it looks like the US has about 50 nuclear plants, with
| only 2 more under construction [3], so they're doing better
| than us, but that's a low bar.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/859266/number-of-
| coal-po... [2]
| https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-
| buil... [3] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=207&t=3
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Nuclear power not renewable.
|
| There is a very finite supply of uranium. The same as with coal,
| natural gas, oil etc.
|
| If we build a substantial number of nuclear power plants all
| across the world, that resource may run out within 200 years.
|
| We have then left our future generations with several hundred new
| sites that cant be used for anything productive for 100s of years
| or a lot more.
|
| A ton of nuclear waste nobody knows what to do with.
|
| Transporting highly dangerous uranium from where they dig it up,
| to the power plants and then from there to somewhere safe is
| risky. It would be the top mission of terrorist groups to
| capture.
|
| They dont have to make a bomb, or anything very advanced. Just
| spreading it over a city like NYC would be bad.
|
| Some say we reached peak uranium in the 80s, some say in 30 years
| ahead. All agree that it is going to happen.
|
| The usual retort from nuclear lobbyists is that we will have
| nuclear power that is new and advanced so there won't be any
| nuclear waste left that we must worry about.
|
| And that new nuclear powerplants will not have the errors the
| hold ones did, so Fukushima, Chernobyl could never happen.
|
| These new advanced nuclear reactors do not exist in any numbers
| and a lot of them do not exist period. They are ideas on a
| drawing board.
|
| Thorium reactors would have access to fuel that is a lot more
| plentiful and easier to extract. Nobody has yet built a proper
| Thorium reactor that is reproducible and affordable. Waste would
| also be less dangerous. Yet some of the transitions the thorium
| reactor process would have would be extremely dangerous.
| Hopefully, they would not stay in that state awfully long.
|
| Breeder reactors would extend the uranium supply for an extremely
| long time. There are two reactors that are in part based on this
| concept.
|
| If we were to start investing in nuclear power, then we need to
| finance building one these new reactors and observe it over 10 to
| 30 years. That should be enough time to learn about most bugs,
| dangers, faults, and problems.
|
| If it looks good, we build a few more and see what happens.
|
| Over several hundred years we could have enough new reactors
| running.
|
| Planning to construct a lot of untested reactors in parallel
| around the world is to me an exceptionally bad idea. We need to
| test learn, fail and learn in an iterative process
|
| IMHO Focus of financing and building sources for electricity
| should be focused on renewable energy that can keep going for a
| long time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
| newbamboo wrote:
| I guess there are two types: 1) those who oppose nuclear because
| they fear science and don't grasp the logistics involved in
| solar, 2) those who might have been able to prevent climate
| change if they had more political sway many decades ago.
|
| I think the first group will win, because it will always be the
| larger group. It will always be a smaller group that have greater
| intelligence and foresight. For this reason I think discussion
| and public debate about climate change is counter productive.
| Trying to involve more people in a solution will just bring more
| mediocre minds to the discussion and hinder our best attempts to
| solve the problem with their innumeracy, ego and lack of
| scientific understanding.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| This is maybe an oversimplification.
|
| My biggest concern comes from waste storage, of which my
| information came from a congressman who had to directly manage
| the waste in a particular state.
|
| To store this waste you must trust many moving parts, including
| greedy politicians, greedy corporations and more.
|
| None of which have ever proven to be trustworthy indefinitely.
|
| I'd rather have less electricity and peace of mind than nuclear
| and be forced to trust the untrustworthy to protect our lands
| forever.
| 46756e wrote:
| I feel like saying "discussion is bad because it brings
| mediocre minds" to a discussion is a bit gatekeep-y. That
| applies to every discussion.
|
| That being said though, I do agree somewhat with the premise
| that "democracy is great because anyone can vote, but it is
| terrible because anyone can vote."
|
| It sucks when some field becomes political, because the
| attitude around it changes from "lets listen to the experts" to
| "it is my God-given right to have an opinion on it regardless
| if I understand the issue."
| rsj_hn wrote:
| The problem with "listening to the experts" is that at some
| point people figure out that the experts are very easy to
| bribe/intimidate/silence. So if we hand over the reigns of
| the nation to experts, then that's basically ceding our
| decision making to whoever can best organize to control the
| most experts. Don't think that academia and the tenure
| process aren't rife with groupthink, forbidden thoughts and
| positions, etc. And it's hard to find a group of people with
| less integrity than researchers chasing grants or academics
| trying to get tenure. Today, universities are the places
| where freedom of thought and expression are most suppressed,
| and groupthink runs rampant. Academics are under the thumbs
| of administrators and terrified of angry student groups.
| Researchers are sometimes afraid of being physically attacked
| if they espouse the wrong opinion. This is not who you want
| to hand control of society over to.
|
| So there is really no substitute for wisdom and intelligence.
| A foolish population is going to make foolish choices and a
| wise population will make wise choices. Both science and
| politics are downstream of culture.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Oh, thank God, finally a counterfactual to Betteridge's law of
| headlines.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| you don't need to implement nuclear, just talk about it
|
| likewise, if you want to solve California's water problems, just
| say "desal"
|
| you don't have to actually build nuclear or desal, just type the
| words, get your upvotes, and shut off debate
| iamgopal wrote:
| Last I calculated all USA energy need can be fullfilled by about
| ~800 ( + 150% to cover all kind of storage and transmission )
| Billion USD investment in solar.
|
| On the other hand, do we have any idea about how long Nuclear
| power will last, If we produce lets say, 50 percent of all our
| energy needs from it ?
| fallingknife wrote:
| A coal plant costs about $ 2 billion, and there are 241 of them
| in the US. So that's $481 billion. They provide 23% of US
| generation capacity. So if we assume a similar cost, that's
| $2.1 trillion for the total US generating capacity. But you say
| solar can do it for $800 billion. So now you have to explain
| why, if solar is really that cheap, the power companies like to
| throw away trillions of dollars on more expensive tech.
| conjecTech wrote:
| The answer is pretty obvious: those plants aren't new and
| solar wasn't an option when they were built. There haven't
| been new coal plants built in the US in some years, and the
| reasons are purely economic. Wind and solar made up 76% of
| the generation added last year for that reason[1]. The
| companies have sunk costs in their existing coal plants, but
| the economics of solar/wind have become so favorably they've
| been prematurely retiring them in droves.
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42495
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Last I calculated all USA energy need can be fullfilled by
| about ~800 ( + 150% to cover all kind of storage and
| transmission ) Billion USD investment in solar.
|
| And what do you do at night, or on a cloudy day?
|
| There is no grid-scale storage solution.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > And what do you do at night, or on a cloudy day?
|
| with photovoltaic generation that is true, but not with
| molten salt
|
| https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16012018/csp-
| concentrated...
| karaterobot wrote:
| > do we have any idea about how long Nuclear power will last,
| If we produce lets say, 50 percent of all our energy needs from
| it ?
|
| This is hard to estimate precisely, since we don't know how
| much uranium is yet to be discovered. At the low-end, using
| current estimates for mineable Uranium, and today's light water
| reactors, about 460 years. At the high end, using newer breeder
| reactors and extracting uranium from seawater, as much as
| 240,000 years. Using a reasonable estimate for mineable
| uranium, and newer breeder reactors, about 120,000 years.
|
| Let's be conservative and say "at least a few thousand years".
|
| Personally, I'd say if we can't get off Earth and find some new
| fuel sources in a few thousand years, we deserve whatever
| happens. And frankly, if it takes us more than 200 years to get
| useful fusion reactors, something has probably gone wrong, and
| we're back to burning wood in caves anyway.
|
| Here's a source:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
| fsh wrote:
| Your source directly contradicts the "460 years" figure.
|
| There they estimate a 230-year supply at today's consumption
| rate. Nuclear energy currently supplies 4.0% of the global
| primary energy production [1]. According to that estimate,
| producing 50% of the primary energy using currently available
| reactors would exhaust the world Uranium supply in around 18
| years.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
| runarberg wrote:
| A follow up question: If $800 Billion investment in solar
| will provide USA with its current energy needs, why bother
| with the slower and more polluting process of building
| nuclear reactors and mine for uranium at all?
|
| The sun will keep shining 10.000 years from now, there is no
| need to move of the planet to find new fuel sources if we
| just keep letting the sun shine on us.
| jherdman wrote:
| You can't ship solar power to remote places that need power in
| the way you would a barrel of oil, or coal. We also don't have
| batteries that are up to the job of storing power.
| epistasis wrote:
| What tiny fraction of world energy use is that, however? And
| of existing world use of energy like that, most of it is used
| to extract fossil fuels. There's not much reason to be out in
| remote areas except for resource extraction.
| [deleted]
| aqme28 wrote:
| On the contrary, remote places are some of the best served by
| solar and wind because shipping fuels is expensive.
| gpm wrote:
| I know exactly one family that lives off the grid. I also
| know exactly one family that lives entirely on solar panels
| and batteries.
|
| It shouldn't be a surprise that they are the same family,
| solar is really the only electricity generation solution that
| scales down nicely for remote places.
|
| Solar fails at high power density applications, like
| airplanes, not remote ones. I suppose it also fails at
| "remote and north of the arctic circle/south of the antarctic
| circle" ones, but that's a pretty tiny rounding error of
| energy usage.
| axiolite wrote:
| > I suppose it also fails at "remote and north of the
| arctic circle/south of the antarctic circle" ones, but
| that's a pretty tiny rounding error of energy usage.
|
| On the contrary. Shipping diesel to remote Alaskan villages
| is so incredibly expensive, even with subsidies, that
| they're seeing a boom in solar power even that far north.
| culi wrote:
| Does that take into account battery costs and the costs of
| building up our manufacturing capabilities to build all that?
| What about the fact that the average lifespan of a panel is
| about 20 years and solar panels contain very toxic chemicals.
| There's already a solar waste crisis that's about to grow
| exponentially and we still don't have a solution for recycling
| them
| jdavis703 wrote:
| That means we only get electricity, when the sun is shining.
| Yes, solar can be good. But it's got to be mixed with other
| tech such as battery, and perhaps even nuclear.
| abacadaba wrote:
| Or we adapt to the variability, charge our laptops and
| routers during the day, live in earthships.
| epistasis wrote:
| The comment you are replying to mentions storage and
| transmission.
|
| It doesn't take much storage to operate solar in a "baseload"
| manner. Already, most new utility scale deployments are
| shipping with storage.
|
| For a long long time, the DC electricity side of a solar
| installation has been cheap enough that the design of a
| system will have an 20% extra DC over the capacity of the
| inverters change the DC to AC electricity for the grid. As
| panels have gotten cheaper, this loading factor has creeped
| up to 1.5 and 1.6 in many installations.
|
| Since battery storage is also on the DC side of the
| installation, adding storage of the doesn't even require
| adding more panels, it can just use the existing clipped
| solar energy. And when we start adding more panels to get the
| loading factor up to 2 or 3, the solar power installation
| becomes nearly completed dispatchable to meet grid needs.
| This is simple and straightforward changes of parameters in
| existing designs.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| That's not really true. More so than just covering for
| night you have weather, and seasons which have significant
| swings in solar productivity. It not a baseload.
| epistasis wrote:
| > weather
|
| Distribute your solar across multiple geographic
| locations
|
| > seasons which have significant swings in solar
| productivity.
|
| Install enough panels so that in the seasonal lull you
| still have enough power. Panels are super cheap these
| days.
|
| Solar panels and storage are on learning curves just like
| integrated circuits are for Moore's law. We are seeing
| absolutely astounding drops in cost every year, and
| innovation is happening continuously.
|
| The future world of renewables energy is one of extreme
| energy abundance. We will size our generation so that in
| the seasonal lulls we have enough energy, which means
| that in the rest of the year we are going to have
| absolutely massive amounts of energy available that's
| near to zero-margin cost (assuming you can move your
| electricity consuming application to be close to the
| generation site, since transmission will still be
| expensive). And this curtailed electricity has far more
| potential uses than the waste heat that comes out of a
| nuclear plant or a coal plant.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Your wishy-washy handwaving style of argument is all fine
| and good for the internet but show me a country (or even
| a reasonably sized city) that's actually self-sufficient
| from solar and wind renewables (backed by storage).
|
| Why do you think Germany is signing multi-billion/multi-
| decade contracts to ship Russian gas if
| solar/wind+storage is a solved problem?
| liketochill wrote:
| How many hours of storage at nameplate capacity do new
| solar farms have? 4? 8? 12?
|
| It does sometimes get cloudy for days on end which reduces
| solar output to about 10-20%.
| epistasis wrote:
| Right now, usually 2-6hours of nameplate capacity. This
| is all that's really needed to meet the evening and
| morning parts of the duck curve, particularly since most
| grids have hydro and wind as well.
|
| However, if there's need for more, then the storage side
| could be expanded. Personally, I'd like to see a ton more
| expansion of solar and storage behind the meter, at
| people's homes and at industrial and commercial sites, so
| that we can reduce the need for transmission and
| distribution. The US stats for electricity costs are
| something like $0.13/kWh on average, with $0.05 of that
| from generation costs and $0.08 from T&D. Even if
| installation costs are slightly higher at smaller, more
| distributed sites, T&D isn't cheap either. And having
| more distributed generation and storage as the potential
| to greatly increase reliability, particularly after
| natural disasters.
| liketochill wrote:
| I agree distributed generation and storage behind the
| meter will grow, especially in places with dysfunctional
| or incompetent utilities.
| [deleted]
| yesbut wrote:
| Do you have any estimates for the amount of coal that would be
| required to burn in order to manufacture the required solar
| photovoltaic cells to cover US energy needs? Does that include
| the increased energy requirements from shifting transportation
| to electric? Also, considering that energy consumption
| increases from year to year, how is that factored into your
| calculations?
| epistasis wrote:
| Why not use solar panels to produce more solar panels, as
| they are produced?
|
| Nuclear has the same bootstrapping problem as any other power
| source, but it also has the problem that we don't yet have a
| way to produce concrete without emissions, and our carbon-
| free steel methods are still in their infancy, and those are
| serious inputs to any new nuclear build.
| orwin wrote:
| Because metallurgy use coal. But some processes could be
| replaced by electricity i think.
| conjecTech wrote:
| Solar's return-on-energy is quite large - on the order of
| 10x, so you could bootstrap the process of creating all the
| solar panels you would ever need with a trivially small
| investment of non solar energy. In practice, it will be
| higher, but given those economics, every solar panel you
| manufacture deters 10x the same amount of non-solar
| electrical consumption.
|
| You need to be precise with how you talk about the shift in
| energy demand due to EVs. It's not a net energy increase. EVs
| are far more efficient than gas vehicles. I assume what you
| mean is increased electricity demand. You can back this out
| based on typical driving metrics - 250wh/mile is a typical
| efficiency for electric vehicles. If each driver does 10k
| miles/year and there are 200M drivers in the US, then this
| equates to a 13% increase in electrical demand for full
| adoption[1]. You could probably add on 2% more for efficiency
| losses in transmission and charging, so call it an additional
| 15%. That's effectively worst case as it assumes no reduction
| from the removal of the current infrastructure(ie pumps for
| gas pipelines, heating for refining, trucking, etc). Those
| are huge users of energy (though much in forms other than
| electricity). Oil refinement alone accounts for ~4% of all
| energy use(not just electricity) in the US.
|
| EVs are so efficient, transitioning to them will probably
| consume less energy than just the energy we currently spend
| producing and distributing gasoline. We'll probably need to
| add to electrical infrastructure, but compared to the savings
| that is easily justifiable.
|
| [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=250+wh%2Fmile+*+100
| 00+...
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it a truism that, in
| the 20th century st least, civilian nuclear power plants were
| simply a wheeze for the actual grand plan: weapons manufacturing?
| The two are coupled in a way that doesn't feel comfortable.
|
| Imagine a different timeline in which something called an Apricot
| bomb became the ultimate must-have weapon of mass destruction to
| ensure a seat at the big boys diplomatic table. E.g. you smash
| apricot stones together to produce annihilation.
|
| Suddenly we have government programmes researching the health
| benefits of apricot juice, a system of distribution of apricot
| juice to all elementary schools, university departments funded
| specifically to produce generation after generation or stone
| fruit experts, oh and sure, a bomb or two, but trust our top men:
| that's not the _main focus_ , silly citizen!
| sien wrote:
| This isn't true. There are many countries that have had nuclear
| reactors for decades and have no nuclear weapons.
|
| Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Canada
| and more.
|
| List of countries with nuclear power :
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations
| pomian wrote:
| Imagine all the left over arsenic waste.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Come friendly bombs. Sweet almond flavoured release.
| bjourne wrote:
| True, and this is the reason why no one believes the Iranian
| government's claim that they are enriching uranium only for
| civilian purposes.
| [deleted]
| doikor wrote:
| Nothing really is the "best bet" in this. The correct solution is
| to hedge your bets by betting on just about every possible
| solution. The local resources available dictate just too much
| what is the "best" solution but even then one should not put all
| the eggs in one basket.
|
| But solving the electricity problem is just solving one part
| (~25%) of the equation. There is still a lot of greenhouse gasses
| being released from cars, construction (concrete), farming and
| various industrial processes. But the electricity seems to be the
| easiest problem to solve and once we have that on track to being
| fixed we can move more resources into the other issues.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Nothing really is the "best bet" in this. The correct solution
| is to hedge your bets by betting on just about every possible
| solution._
|
| This seems like a "fallacy of the option spectrum". Of course
| we don't try cold fusion or discredited options. Trying options
| based on how credit they seem is a reasonable approach but "try
| it 'cause it's a thing" isn't argument.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I agree, but would point out that "Try every option based on
| how credible it seems" is also an insufficient or under-
| specified answer, because the viability of each option
| depends on how much resources are invested in that option.
|
| For example, if a trillion dollars were invested in nuclear
| reactors, it would probably be possible to build them fast
| enough and safely enough to satisfy most people, whereas
| spending just ten dollars on nuclear energy would not be
| enough to solve climate change. Similarly, over-building
| renewables and researching batteries with a trillion dollars
| might be enough to start reversing CO2 levels, but ten
| dollars won't make a difference.
|
| Given limited resources, determining how to allocate them to
| maximise the probability of success is really the essence of
| the problem, rather than just identifying that there are
| several approaches that could be tried simultaneously.
| jabl wrote:
| > Nothing really is the "best bet" in this. The correct
| solution is to hedge your bets by betting on just about every
| possible solution. The local resources available dictate just
| too much what is the "best" solution but even then one should
| not put all the eggs in one basket.
|
| It aggravates me to no end that people are fighting this
| pointless nuclear vs. renewables war, all the while fossil
| fuels are laughing all the way to the bank.
|
| Should be invest in building nuclear? YES! Should we invest in
| wind and solar? YES! Should we invest in grid-scale storage?
| YES! Should we invest in transmission capacity? YES!
|
| > But solving the electricity problem is just solving one part
| (~25%) of the equation. There is still a lot of greenhouse
| gasses being released from cars, construction (concrete),
| farming and various industrial processes. But the electricity
| seems to be the easiest problem to solve and once we have that
| on track to being fixed we can move more resources into the
| other issues.
|
| Electricity is in some ways the easiest problem, yes, but also
| once we have clean electricity we can use that to decarbonize
| many other sectors. Transportation, to a large extent. Heating,
| yes. Many important industrial processes can use hydrogen, like
| steel production. Etc.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Not true: solar is the clear winner. Thus far, storage hasn't
| been important, but will become so soon. Very cheap iron-air
| batteries will roll out in 2023. Wind will remain important, as
| will long-distance power transmission.
|
| Spending on other methods is not just wasted; it means not
| spending those dollars on solar.
|
| But replacing Portland cement with one of the numerous carbon-
| neutral alternatives is urgent, as is building out all-electric
| ammonia and hydrogen synthesis: hydrogen for steel production,
| and ammonia to fuel retrofitted container ships.
| civilized wrote:
| I hope you're right about the iron-air batteries. I heard
| good things about them a couple months ago and hope it's
| going well.
| loeg wrote:
| Every unproven battery technology is "right around the
| corner." I would love cheap, scalable iron-air batteries to
| be available in 2023, but I am not holding my breath. We need
| to plan around technologies that exist, because we need to
| act now rather than wait 5 years before acting.
| ncmncm wrote:
| What we need to do now is build out solar panels. Until
| their share of generating capacity approaches a stability
| limit, spending on other tech is counterproductive.
|
| Iron-air is not, in fact, unproven. Factories big enough to
| build what will be needed are right now under construction.
| We will need a lot. We will also need hundreds of ammonia
| and hydrogen production plants.
| crubier wrote:
| Put simply: Yes. Nuclear Power is (part of) our Best Bet Against
| Climate Change.
|
| I don't even think this requires further arguments, in 2021. This
| fact has been known for like 20 years, by anyone having a clue
| about orders of magnitude and energy.
| NoblePublius wrote:
| Just gonna be that guy on this thread who is not convinced
| anthropogenic climate change is a thing, or that if it is a thing
| that it is more significant than natural variations of climate.
| The economic and political consequences of the proposed solutions
| to this alleged crisis (enrich these corporations and these
| nations at the expense of these corporations and these nations)
| are too glaringly one sided to suggest empirical impartiality.
|
| It also continues to astound me that proponents of the "climate
| crisis" narrative never make any mention whatsoever of the fact
| that the most valuable energy company/car company in the world
| makes solar panels, batteries, and electric cars. Instead climate
| crisis actors demonize Tesla for not being unionized (eg, Tesla
| excluded from the White House American Electric Car Summit) and
| are lining up at the piggie trough for exclusive Biden bucks that
| will fund infrastructure investments that will help Ford and GM
| catch up to Tesla.
|
| To wit: our best bet to speed the transition to sustainable
| energy is to get out of the way of the capitalists who have
| already solved this problem with superior transportation and
| energy products.
| epistasis wrote:
| Just going to be the guy that says that not only is human
| caused climate change a massive threat to humanity's economic
| future, but also that even if it were not, it would be far
| cheaper to switch to carbon-free tech than continue on our
| current path. Carbon free electricity is cheaper than fossil
| fuel, and as we electrify things like home heating and
| transport, we typically see efficiency increases of 200%-600%,
| meaning we need far less primary power to begin with.
|
| Any objection to the scientific basis of anthropogenic climate
| change is based on political ideology and false propaganda. We
| need to stop having allegiances to politicians and bad news
| sources, and maintain allegiance to truth and the unbiased
| pursuit of it. Far too many in our country are tools of fossil
| fuel interests. So while I agree that some environmentalists
| are tools of weird political ideologies, they are staying
| closer to the truth than those who oppose climate change.
| Unless most of your wealth is tied up directly in fossil fuel
| assets that you can't sell, you are also shortchanging your own
| economic future by not embracing newer and better technology.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Just gonna be that guy on this thread who is not convinced
| anthropogenic climate change is a thing, or that if it is a
| thing that it is more significant than natural variations of
| climate.
|
| Facts are true whether you believe them or not. Sure, there are
| wide error bars on some of the margins, and the feedback loops
| in the climate system are difficult to tease out. But if you
| look at a graph like this, https://www.co2levels.org/ , and are
| still attempting to argue that you're not "convinced" that
| _doubling_ the primary greenhouse gas in our atmosphere isn 't
| going to have huge effects, well, can't do much for you there.
| envengineer wrote:
| I admire your comments. Of course everyone jumps on you,
| ignoring the valuable summary of actions that truly need
| discussion, and of what one person has accomplished, to move us
| forward with a real answer to our dependence on fossil fuels.
| redisman wrote:
| It's naive at best. If there's no mechanism for externalities
| then why would we stop burning coal and oil when the
| infrastructure is already in place?
| simion314 wrote:
| >Just gonna be that guy on this thread who is not convinced
| anthropogenic climate change is
|
| Are you amused how some idiots are convinced Earth is flat
| where is so easy to prove is a sphere or some round shape?
|
| Similarly it trivial to show that if you put CO2 from the
| ground in the atmosphere stuff happens, so if you have the
| brain to do some math, if you believe that coal burning
| releases CO2 in the atmosphere and if you trust the physics
| laws then you should be convinced that climate change exists
| exactly the same as you could be convinced that the planet os
| round and it rotates, but you need to be 14+ years
| intellectually AND not a conspiractionist that don't belive in
| physics laws.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is an endless stream of pro-nuclear articles ever since the
| nuclear lobby figured out that their best bet to get re-instated
| as a viable source of power is to hitch their wagon to climate
| change. But it doesn't change a thing about the underlying
| issues: non-proliferation, radio active waste, potential for
| accidents, very bad economy over the total operational life-span.
| envengineer wrote:
| Interesting to consider how much that lobby has quietly funded
| CO2 research projects, to prove anthropogenic effects. Also
| interesting that the big push to consider CO2 and it's impacts,
| started about the time a 30 year moratorium on nuclear power
| was coming to an end.
| beeboop wrote:
| Waste has never been a problem and especially isn't a problem
| with modern reactors. They're safer than coal burning plants.
| Their economies are much better than alternatives when you
| account for the cost of environment, life, and pollution for
| things like coal burning plants. I feel like I've had to debunk
| all of these points literally a dozen times on HN and I'm
| really tired of putting in the effort.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sure, pull the other one. You can't credibly debunk any of
| these because they've been a problem with _every reactor
| built to date_. You can pretend that they won 't be a problem
| for any of the 'new and untried designs', however, I'm pretty
| sure that by the time that we build them and operate them for
| a couple of decades they'll turn out much the same as the
| previous lot, which were also supposed to be cheap, non-
| polluting, reliable and absolutely never subject to anything
| remotely like an accident.
|
| Why people keep falling for this is a mystery to me.
|
| Comparing with coal burning plants is nonsense, compare to
| wind/hydro/solar on a long enough timescale rather than to
| compare with the most polluting fossil fuel. That's stacking
| the deck in favor of nuclear.
|
| I'm sure nuclear has its place in this whole story, but let's
| not pretend that it is without problems, at best it will be a
| stepping stone.
| Nicksil wrote:
| > but let's not pretend that it is without problems
|
| Nobody is doing that.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh, ok. I must be following different news sources than
| you do then. According to the most recent push for
| nuclear it is all a-ok, safe, clean, infinite supply and
| even 'green' for whatever that means. If there are
| problems they certainly aren't given much airtime, if
| any, and if there are alternatives they are much less
| well funded from a PR perspective, because nuclear is
| 'big business' and solar and wind much less so.
|
| All this is is a way to sway public opinion, nothing
| actually gets solved in the short term.
| paulintrognon wrote:
| > Comparing with coal burning plants is nonsense, compare
| to wind/hydro/solar on a long enough timescale rather than
| to compare with the most polluting fossil fuel.
|
| Well Germany is replacimg part of nuclear energy with
| natural gas plants so it is a really important debate
| indeed.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The 'in between' phase will be a tricky one. But it won't
| change the final outcome much.
| kvakkefly wrote:
| It seems like you assume that other sources of energy are
| without waste and accidents. Nuclear power has by far the
| lowest number of deaths / produced energy and the total volume
| of waste is not that much. During all time of nuclear, the
| total volume of waste is about the annual waste produced by
| solar cells.
|
| See a nice summary (with sources you can check) at
| https://energy.glex.no/calculator
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's if things go well. If they don't...
| Aachen wrote:
| Have you even looked at the statistics? The point kinda is
| that injury and death tolls tell you precisely how often it
| doesn't go well for different types of energy production
| (including the mining of resources, storage/dumping of
| waste, etc.). I can't imagine you wrote that comment
| knowing how much less risky fission is.
| missedthecue wrote:
| If a solar panel has a catastrophic incident, you replace it.
| If a windmill has a catastrophic accident, you replace it. If
| a gas plant has a catastrophic accident, you replace it and
| have five funerals.
|
| If a nuclear plant has a catastrophic accident, Western
| Europe could be uninhabitable for generations. Likely? No.
| But completely possible.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Whereas solar panels and wind energy of course have no lobby
| whatsoever and are only being promoted by idealistic, well
| meaning activists that can be trusted 100%.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is attempting to put the solar and wind lobby on equal
| footing with the nuclear lobby: it isn't even close.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Why not? I mean, maybe not, but what makes you so sure? The
| solar and wind lobby stands to make trillions of dollars
| from government spending, but we are supposed to think they
| don't do any lobbying? Only the nuclear industry is in it
| for the money?
| poormystic wrote:
| Is the practise of Love our best defense against our own
| carelessness?
| rbrbr wrote:
| Every time there is an article about nuclear energy it has
| hundreds of comments here, many of which are pro nuclear. And
| every time I write the same, nuclear energy only is cheap energy
| if you ignore the entire decommission costs, which is what the
| big atomic industry always does. And that big lie is the core of
| the problem.
| deeviant wrote:
| No, by virtue of Betteridge's law of headlines.
|
| Also by virtue that nuclear plants are too expensive, take far
| too long to plan, authorize and build, only make sense in stable
| developed countries where the dirtiest and fastest growing carbon
| emissions are generally in more unstable third-world countries.
| Oh and they aren't fairing well against solar and wind plus
| storage in terms of price: It will probably be less than a decade
| before wind and solar + storage are cheaper than nuclear.
| cletus wrote:
| According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of
| greenhouse gas emissions. While that's significant, replacing all
| fossil fuel usage for power production is significant.
|
| The standard concerns apply:
|
| 1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of
| enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are
| simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;
|
| 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of
| fission waste products;
|
| 3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl
| Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years
| after the fact; and
|
| 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or
| corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear
| power plants at scale.
|
| > Researchers have estimated that about 1 in 5 deaths globally
| can be attributed to fossil fuels through air pollution alone
|
| From the linked post [2]:
|
| Also worth noting:
|
| > The study shows that more than 8 million people around the
| globe die each year as a result of breathing in air containing
| particles from burning fuels like coal, petrol and diesel, ...
|
| So it's including vehicles. You could be 100% nuclear power
| generation and that part wouldn't change. The counterpoint is
| electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they
| have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in
| much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of
| the power used to charge them.
|
| [1]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-
| emis...
|
| [2]: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/fossil-fuel-air-
| pollutio...
| csallen wrote:
| _> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don 't trust
| governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and
| operate nuclear power plants at scale._
|
| Genuine question: Don't we already trust governments to do all
| of the above for nuclear submarines, arsenals, etc? Are power
| plants so much riskier?
| antattack wrote:
| We do try to keep nuclear know how away from some governments
| and punish others who try to acquire it.
|
| Just recently US military Genaral was apparently concerned
| about POTUS having access to nuclear codes.
| capkutay wrote:
| "The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl
| Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years
| after the fact"
|
| We can also talk about all the tragedies and catastrophic
| events related to commercial aviation. But no one in their
| right mind would propose that we stop or slow down the airline
| industry because of the 'failure modes'.
| tuatoru wrote:
| I may not be in my right mind, but there is a #nofly tag on
| twitter.
|
| Edit: tourism is a low productivity, low value,
| environmentally harmful industry. Fiji's coral reefs, for
| example, were beautiful, diverse, and productive, according
| to old National Geographics. Now they are gone.
|
| We could do better with VR, as in the film "Soylent Green".
|
| Edit. I agree with your point, which is that all technology
| choices have costs. There are no Disney miracles.
| jollybean wrote:
| 1) Electricity could replace most carbon usage, the amount
| generated now from carbon is almost besides the point.
|
| "So it's including vehicles. You could be 100% nuclear power
| generation and that part wouldn't change."
|
| ? We're going to electric cars. Cars currently run on fossil
| fuels because it was cheap and convenient, that will change.
|
| 2) We have at least mid-term storage and there are plenty of
| options on the table for long-term we just have to make up our
| minds.
|
| 3) The 'failure modes' are not that bad - nobody died in
| Fukishima - and - we can limit them. Neither Fukishima nor
| Chernobyl plants should have ever been running.
|
| At this point, the only thing stopping us is ourselves.
|
| To the extend we are organized and competent we can do it just
| as well.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Nitpick: in the Fukushima incident, one worker died of
| radiation poisoning and 273 (elderly) people died of
| evacuation-related stress.
|
| Still negligible compared to the deaths from coal burning.
| And as you say, the Fukushima reactors are much worse than
| current designs like Hualong One.
| swebs wrote:
| >We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of
| enrichment byproducts
|
| Currently fossil fuel plants vent all waste into the
| atmosphere, including radioactive byproducts. At least in this
| case, the waste is in solid form and can be contained
| somewhere.
| xwdv wrote:
| Dealing with nuclear waste is a can we can kick down the road
| for quite a long time. Climate change will kill many of us off
| by the end of the century.
| snewman wrote:
| > According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of
| greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| Yes, but realistic plans for addressing climate change
| generally entail converting a lot of other activities to
| electric power; this is on the table for everything from
| transportation, to heating + cooking, to steel manufacturing.
| Not to mention carbon capture; many of the options there
| require a lot of energy. Even if some modes of transportation
| continue to require chemical fuels, we may be using electricity
| to produce some of those fuels.
|
| It's reasonable to quibble at the margins, but in the big
| picture, we are going to need a LOT of carbon-neutral
| electricity and that is going to drive a lot (the solid
| majority?) of greenhouse gas mitigation.
|
| > The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are
| generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher
| cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to
| factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them.
|
| What point are you making with regard to externalities?
| Everything has externalities, you just need to add them into
| your calculus. Are you suggesting the externalities of electric
| vehicles imply that we should stick to fossil fuels for
| transportation?
|
| As for higher cost: cost should continue to come down as we
| continue to climb the learning curve. I don't know if / when
| the lines cross (and of course it will be different for
| different use cases and locations), but again - if we're going
| to address climate change, we don't have a lot of choices; we
| will have to find a way to bring costs down and/or subsidize
| the higher cost.
|
| "Limited utility" is absolutely going to be an ongoing
| challenge, but again it's not like we're helpless to do
| anything about it. More charging stations, longer range,
| possibly adjustments to usage patterns. In some cases, yes, we
| might need to stick to chemical fuels and find carbon-neutral
| sources, but this is not ideal and my expectation+hope is that
| it will eventually be very much a minority of usage.
|
| I should note, I'm not advocating for nuclear power as the
| source of all this electricity we'll need; the feasibility of
| scaling nuclear power is a complicated topic and personally, I
| honestly don't know what to think or expect. The point I am
| trying to make is that a BIG part of "how to stop emitting
| GHGs" is going to boil down to "how to generate a stupendous
| amount of carbon-neutral electricity".
| closeparen wrote:
| What is the long term solution for "the last few weeks have
| been cloudy"?
| tuatoru wrote:
| Diversity.
|
| Long distance (1000 km) transmission, wind AND solar, short
| term storage, load shedding agreements, and long duration
| storage.
|
| Iron-air looks economically viable already for timescales of
| two days to two weeks. Hot rock storage, the same.
|
| It's rare to get cloudy calm periods lasting longer than two
| weeks over 1000 km distances, but there are readily available
| seasonal storage choices.
|
| Electrolysed hydrogen, either stored directly or as ammonia.
| Just need PV prices to fall a bit, which is expected, and the
| cost of electrolysis to fall, which is happening.
|
| I have only hit the universals here. Depending on geography
| and mining history, there are a bunch of other storage
| options available in many places. Mechanical (gravity) storag
| other than pumped hydro is another possible technology. So is
| methane synthesised from CO2.
|
| Edit. I'm in favour of nuclear, if the numbers work. The LNT
| theory should be exposed as the bull** that it is and ALARA
| abandoned in favour of specified limits. Then let nuclear
| compete with renewables.
| andrekandre wrote:
| yes, and i get the feeling that like global communications,
| our power grids will have to be internationally (and
| continentally?) linked up so that different regions can
| augment lower generation elsewhere...
| bwestergard wrote:
| I think the main objection, which is mentioned briefly in the
| article, is that the infrastructure for nuclear energy
| generation is largely identical with that required for nuclear
| weapons production and maintenance. It is difficult to envision
| nuclear energy as a global solution without also envisioning
| new nuclear weapons proliferation problems.
|
| One position that seems attractive is keeping some nuclear
| plants online where they exist, but not building any new
| capacity. On a long enough time scale, we can engineer around
| base load requirements.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Internationalize the Gid (which is also good for amortizing
| renewables), and then invest more in thorium research.
|
| Ideally, if we do the small nuclear reactors, we can switch
| assembly lines from one to the other with relative ease.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Internationalize the grid (which is also good for amortizing
| renewables), and then invest more in thorium research.
|
| Ideally, if we do the small nuclear reactors, we can switch
| assembly lines from one to the other with relative ease.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Can't wait for the nuclear version of Western Europe facing
| gas shortages because of Russian disputes with Eastern
| European states their gas pipelines run through, then.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| What? You realize that the energy density of fissile
| material is such that stockpiling is much easier?
| cletus wrote:
| I honestly don't buy into the nuclear proliferation objection
| to fission power for several reasons:
|
| 1. Uranium is abundant. There are parts of the US you can
| walk around and pick up rocks that contain Uranium compounds
| that can be extracted without anything complicated;
|
| 2. Enriching uranium is relatively trivial. You basically
| need the ability to make UF6 and to make and operate
| centrifuges. That's it. This is 80+ year old tech; and
|
| 3. The design of an atomic bomb as was dropped on Hiroshima
| is likewise "primitive" and easily reproducible.
|
| There is really no substantial barrier-to-entry to nuclear
| weapons. The only thing that's missing now is the political
| will.
|
| The biggest factor in nuclear proliferation is nation-states
| seeking to guarantee their future existence (ie North Korea,
| Iran). Foreign policy by the dominant developed powers is far
| more significant than any imagined or real technological or
| industrial barrier.
| creato wrote:
| I think nuclear energy is the solution to climate change,
| but this post is trivializing the issue. Yes, the steps to
| make the first atomic bombs are simple in concept, but in
| practice requires an enormous amount of resources (money
| and time).
|
| Some of those resources overlap with nuclear power plants,
| hence the proliferation concern. Existing nuclear power
| infrastructure reduces the resources required to build a
| bomb.
| jcoq wrote:
| Well we have no solution for the byproducts of fossil fuels
| except to spew them into the atmosphere. So I'd say that
| nuclear fuel is superior.
|
| We're not going to solve climate change while maintaining the
| same level of energy consumption without making some tradeoffs.
|
| I feel like the environmentalist movement's sentimentalism is
| what helped to get us here. We change Earth - it's what humans
| do. We at least need it to be habitable.
|
| Nuclear energy's risks are known and have solutions that exist
| today.
| envengineer wrote:
| Actually we have solutions for All those byproducts. Just as
| with NO2,SO2 capture was enabled after we found those are
| bad. We can scrub CO2 too. It is just a matter of cost. And
| desire.
| philwelch wrote:
| > We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of
| enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results
| are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date,
| expensive
|
| Depleted uranium is a useful and valuable material and not just
| a "byproduct" to be "disposed" of.
|
| > We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of
| fission waste products
|
| Long-lived fission waste products can be fed into breeder
| reactors to produce new fuel. We don't do this because we
| haven't chosen to grow the deployment of nuclear power. The
| need for long term storage of long-lived fission waste products
| is a consequence of self-inflicted decline that the advocates
| of self-inflicted decline can turn around and use as an
| argument in favor of self-inflicted decline.
| yodelshady wrote:
| So, the _worst nuclear plant ever_ occupies about twice as much
| land as the comparable solar installation would need.
|
| Except they're not comparable are they? A decent chunk of that
| 75% is _winter heating_. Which, weirdly, lots of Russian
| districts have pretty much solved, somehow, without gas. Wonder
| how?
| air7 wrote:
| > According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of
| greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| I feel this is a misleading statistic, as cheap green (perhaps
| subsidised) electricity would offset more that that. The report
| states:
|
| Transportation 29%: With cheap electricity I can easily imagine
| a huge shift to EVs within a decade.
|
| Industry 23%: "Greenhouse gas emissions from industry primarily
| come from burning fossil fuels for energy".
|
| Not sure what they mean, but energy could just as easily be
| created with electricity in an industrial setting.
|
| Commercial and Residential 13%: "Greenhouse gas emissions from
| businesses and homes arise primarily from fossil fuels burned
| for heat".
|
| Same. Heat could easily made from electricity.
|
| So it seems to me that dirt cheap clean electricity could fix a
| huge chunk of our problem.
| m0zg wrote:
| Chernobyl, famously, did not have a containment building around
| it. We don't build reactors like that. In addition today you
| can build reactors which simply do not have the failure modes
| that led to either Chernobyl or Fukushima.
|
| > Researchers have estimated that about 1 in 5 deaths globally
| can be attributed to fossil fuels through air pollution alone
|
| This is a pet peeve of mine. They always use flimsiest of
| statistics to "attribute it" so, but never mention how many
| people would die if it _wasn't_ for fossil fuels. The number
| would be in the billions. Much of Canada, and all of Russia's
| north would freeze to death. People in Africa, India and China
| would starve. Industry (and with it livelihoods of billions of
| people worldwide) would collapse. Europe would erupt in a war.
| And so on. Hardly a wortwhile tradeoff. And no, it is not
| possible to replace all uses of fossil fuels with electricity.
| Not now, not in the foreseeable future.
| ars wrote:
| Your point 1 and 2 are simply untrue, and I wish people would
| stop repeating them.
|
| Breeder reactors will consume all of those waste products
| leaving only short term waste. Right now we use barely 1% of
| the energy in Uranium - all the rest is that terrible waste.
|
| With a breeder reactors we can consume substantially all of it.
| himinlomax wrote:
| It's not exactly wasted as it's safely kept around and could
| be reused should the need and will arise. Compare and
| contrast with hydrocarbon waste, those are truly wasted.
| na85 wrote:
| >I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain,
| inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
|
| The US Navy has 300+ reactors and has been operating them for
| decades without incident.
| cletus wrote:
| Oh really? [1]
|
| The most serious incident is probably the partial meltdown at
| Three Mile Island. While it wasn't as serious as Chernobyl or
| Fukushima, "without incident" seems at best a stretch.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_
| in_t...
| Maakuth wrote:
| A large share of the other GHG emitting sectors could also
| shift to electricity. For example various heating processes in
| industry and commercial sectors burn fuels such as natural gas
| and could switch to electricity.
|
| And the externalities of providing energy to electric
| transportation is very much what we are talking about: where
| are we getting the power from.
| ttul wrote:
| Waste heat from nuclear can also be used for industrial
| processes. And it's waste heat. It's free.
| epistasis wrote:
| Good luck transmitting it to where you need it, though...
|
| The waste heat is also a significant limiting factor for
| nuclear, currently. In the US, we only have a limited
| amount of water heat sinks that we can use to dissipate
| waste heat, and there's limited heating allowed before we
| destroy those ecosystems. The figure that I heard recently
| was about ~500GW across the nation. After that, we will
| need to find other solutions, which bar often more
| expensive that using natural water. There's a nuclear plant
| in Arizona that uses water water from Phoenix, for example.
| But after that we will need some innovation in water heat
| management to overcome the natural limitations of thermal
| generators like nuclear, at least while on planet earth.
| Accujack wrote:
| >Good luck transmitting it to where you need it,
| though...
|
| True, but the scale of the problem we're dealing with
| makes it worthwhile to consider locating certain
| industries near nuclear plants to take advantage of low
| cost/free energy. Locating industries there means they
| can close elsewhere, freeing space and lowering
| consumption of electricity.
|
| >The waste heat is also a significant limiting factor for
| nuclear,
|
| It is, but the above also helps with that, consuming the
| waste heat to some degree as it simultaneously makes
| industry cheaper to operate.
|
| Another possibility is to use the waste heat from a
| reactor to heat indoor farms/greenhouses. A vertical farm
| uses a fraction of the water an outdoor farm does, it
| produces food in a very small area of land relative to an
| outdoor farm, it produces high quality food that usually
| needs no pesticides to produce good yields.
|
| One final advantage of vertical farms is that they free
| up land to allow it to be reforested or at least planted
| with non food crops that will absorb more CO2 from the
| atmosphere.
|
| So many people's thinking about how to adapt our power
| generation to climate change is limited by the assumption
| that whatever we do must be a drop in replacement for
| what we have now. That's not the case, and in fact it's
| likely we'll have to change far more than just how we
| generate power to survive.
| jabl wrote:
| Dry cooling is a possible solution (that is, using
| ambient air as the final heat sink rather than some body
| of water). It does slightly decrease the thermal
| efficiency of the plant, as well as increase capital
| cost, but is a workable solution.
| evv wrote:
| Any reason not to use ocean water? The Diablo Canyon
| reactor in California has tech that limits ocean water
| temperature increase to 20degF, to avoid harm to sea
| life.
|
| You can also spend excess energy on desalination, which
| is helpful for water-starved places like CA.
|
| And yes, this is CA's only nuclear reactor, which
| politicians are actively pushing to shut down without a
| replacement.
| jabl wrote:
| Ocean water is indeed an excellent source of cooling
| water.
|
| Many thermal power plants (nuclear and others) are
| situated along rivers not because people were stupid and
| didn't realize the ocean exists, but because those power
| plants are sited to serve nearby communities and
| industries.
|
| Sure, long distance electricity transmission is one
| solution (HVDC or traditional AC). Using ambient air as
| the final heat sink is another. Both have costs in terms
| of energy loss and higher capital costs, but are doable.
| epistasis wrote:
| It's funny that you mention Diablo Canyon's ocean intake,
| but then say it's politicians pushing for shutdown.
|
| Diablo Canyon is being shutdown, not by politicians, but
| by the utility PG&E. The wikipedia page for DC now stays
| that PG&E is shutting it down because they don't want to
| operate it half time when there are cheaper renewable
| resources, but in the past I think a bigger impact was
| that water cooling system. DC uses once through cooling
| currently, and would need to convert away from that in
| order to meet modern environmental regulations.
|
| So though I suppose you could blame "politicians" for
| pushing for the closure, that omits some really important
| facts about why PG&E is closing, and it all comes down to
| costs and environmental regulations that affect all
| plants, not just nuclear.
| loeg wrote:
| Those costs facing PG&E are essentially imposed by
| politicians subsidizing solar/wind.
| epistasis wrote:
| Without any subsidies at all, nuclear can not compete
| with solar + storage in costs.
|
| If we want nuclear to survive on the grid, we need to
| figure out how essential is actually is, and then work
| out market structures or subsidies that will keep nuclear
| around.
|
| It's too late for Diablo Canyon, the decision to close
| was made five years ago, and the only reason to extend
| its life now is for an emergency but if extra generation
| capacity on the grid. If DC's life is extended 10 years
| or so that way, it may provide a bridge to a new
| generation of SMRs, but I am extremely skeptical that
| SMRs will be any cheaper than other large thermal
| generators of electricity, and those cants compete on
| costs now.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| No, he's right, nuclear is held back by red tape. The
| energy density of nuclear is so high it beats literally
| everything. Sans pointless laws or subsidies there is no
| reason to believe nuclear is less useful than renewables.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Nuclear is also by far more dangerous and long-term-
| problematic than everything else, hence the regulations.
| [deleted]
| epistasis wrote:
| That's exactly it. All of our decarbonization plans rest on
| electrifying everything. Even many chemical feedstocks, like
| hydrogen for ammonia fertilizer, will be produced through
| electricity.
|
| > Clean electricity is the plate at the decarbonization BBQ.
| Everything else gets loaded onto it. Without clean
| electricity, things get messy.
|
| - Costa Samaras
| spfzero wrote:
| "you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to
| charge them."
|
| Presumably that would be power from nuclear power plants,
| making electric vehicles that much more carbon free. So the
| vehicle part could change, and dramatically as electric
| vehicles replace fossil-fueled vehicles.
| zepto wrote:
| > I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain,
| inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
|
| This is my biggest concern as well. However it needs to be
| balanced against the alternative, which is trusting governments
| and corporations to deal with climate change in other ways.
|
| A reality check tells us:
|
| 1. Governments and corporations _have not_ responded to climate
| change adequately so far and there is no evidence that this is
| about to change.
|
| 2. Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power _is_
| something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer
| excess deaths than coal.
|
| It's far from ideal, but it is here and it works.
| chernobogdan wrote:
| Is that really worse then the current geopolitical situation
| where you are indirectly trusting 3rd party governments (e.g
| north korea) not to start a nuclear war?
| LaGrange wrote:
| > 2. Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is
| something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer
| excess deaths than coal.
|
| ...can "we", do it, though? AFAIR (this is based on an
| internal study for a policy proposal done in 2015 by a minor
| Polish party, so take it with a grain of salt) one major
| issue is the lack of expertise. To build a nuclear power
| plant safely you need specialized and experienced engineers,
| and after a long lull in construction, most states don't have
| that many of those. And we would need _a lot_.
|
| And Chernobyl is an interesting example here, because one of
| the reasons for its (and many other Soviet and Russian
| projects) low quality is that Soviet Union/Russia have been
| stuck in emergency mode since the Tsars. You just needed that
| many flats and that much power like two decades ago - so you
| winged it. Thus I am wary of industrial facilities handling
| hazardous materials that are built in emergency mode, and the
| only way I see EU building enough reactors in 10 years to
| handle our energy needs without _major_ cuts is by winging it
| quite a bit.
|
| That doesn't mean we shouldn't - if we don't build reactors,
| nobody will go into engineering those, and the issue will
| persist. But I don't think we can stake our near-term future
| on them. That fight was lost a while ago.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Then I guess we're effed then. After all, if we can't trust
| non-government entities like Equifax with private records,
| why even go as far as trusting some other non-government
| entities to handle nuclear reactors?
|
| We're all to die then, if we're to believe that letting
| climate change take its course is better than the occasional
| nuclear meltdown.
|
| > Governments and corporations have not responded to climate
| change adequately so far and there is no evidence that this
| is about to change.
|
| How else are they to fill their pockets with wealth taxed via
| inflation if there are no crises? There must always be a
| crisis looming to get people to part with their wealth.
|
| > Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is
| something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer
| excess deaths than coal.
|
| Leadership knows full well that this is a fact. Think about
| that.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _Then I guess we 're effed then. After all, if we can't
| trust non-government entities like Equifax with private
| records, why even go as far as trusting some other non-
| government entities to handle nuclear reactors?_
|
| The point is that the drawbacks of Nuclear far out weight
| it's benefits, and it's simply better all around to invest
| into energy sources which aren't as reliant on flawless
| management or execution to avoid catastrophic failure
| modes.
| zepto wrote:
| > The point is that the drawbacks of Nuclear far out
| weight it's benefits
|
| The evidence so far points to the opposite.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _The evidence so far points to the opposite._
|
| No, not really.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accid
| ent...
|
| And keep in mind that the whole world, which is migrating
| away from nuclear, also disagrees with that personal
| assertion.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| It's like with cars vs. airplanes. Most people learned to
| live with the comparatively high risk of driving a car,
| yet often have a (silent) fear of flying Boeing/Airbus
| even though they are much safer. Psychological effect of
| high-profile airplane accidents vs. small scale (but much
| more numerous) car deaths.
|
| The list of e.g. hydroelectric accidents is very long and
| deadly, but they are not as "spectacular". How many
| people are aware of Banqiao Dam failure, which killed 250
| 000 people and with that single-handedly exceeded the
| death toll of all nuclear accidents combined?
|
| There's actually several studies of energy sources and
| their "deaths per TWh" and nuclear usually comes out as
| the safest.
| nuerow wrote:
| > It's like with cars vs. airplanes. Most people learned
| to live with the comparatively high risk of driving a
| car, yet often have a (silent) fear of flying
| Boeing/Airbus even though they are much safer.
|
| I don't feel this is a serious comparison, let alone
| conveys the tradeoffs that need to be considered.
|
| The risk on the table is pretty much the NIMBY rationale:
| if you're arguing about risks and given that it's
| unthinkable to presume that there is zero chance of
| experiencing problems on any type of power plant, do you
| prefer to deal with a technology whose failure mode does
| not have any significant impact or do you wish to deal
| with a technology whose failure modes involve the need to
| create and manage exclusion zones with a radius of dozens
| of km which persist for decades on end? This is
| particularly relevant as we consider that the bulk of
| energy demands come from densely occupied urban regions.
|
| And regarding safety, this sort of risk assessment stats
| used to push Nuclear as a safe alternative fails to take
| into account the strategic importance of a power plant
| and how they are automatically targets in any national
| security scenario. Thus extrapolating peace time
| statistics, which are already quite bad, also fails to
| adequately classify the full risks of relying on nuclear.
| visarga wrote:
| Let me spell it out: more people will die and suffer if
| we don't support nuclear. There is no way to fix it with
| renewables. It would just waste the time and amplify the
| damages.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Thereby no one should rightfully speculate or disagree?
| That's pretty fallacious.
|
| Also, that Wikipedia page you just looked up doesn't
| really make a good case for your assertion.
|
| > [...] although nobody has died or is expected to die
| from radiation effects [of Fukishima].
|
| The number of deaths related to Nuclear accidents doesn't
| even exceed the single-digit thousands, and after
| Chernobyl the number of deaths related to other accidents
| doesn't even exceed 20.
|
| On the other hand, virtually every globalist governmental
| entity (if we're gonna go by appeals to authority and
| majority here) believes that climate change will soon be
| related to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year.
|
| https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-
| cha...
|
| > Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to
| cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year,
| from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.
|
| So no, the migration away from nuclear doesn't close the
| case on _why_ places like California moved away from
| nuclear.
|
| There could be a Chernobyl every year and, if we are to
| believe the likes of the WHO and the UN, it still
| wouldn't approach the number of deaths resulting from
| climate change.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _Thereby no one should rightfully speculate or
| disagree? That 's pretty fallacious._
|
| It's one thing to state that you personally believe in
| something. It's an entirely different thing to try to
| pass off a personal opinion and baseless assertions as
| some kind of established consensus, particluarly as they
| fly in the face of reality.
|
| > _Also, that Wikipedia page you just looked up doesn 't
| really make a good case for your assertion._
|
| It presents solid enough cases to motivate the current
| global phase-out of Nuclear power.
|
| And, unlike the GP's personal assertion, it does provide
| a rationale based on facts and real-world experience
| assessed and considered by decision-makers.
|
| If you have a genuine curiosity about the subject and
| you're interested in getting up to speed on the topic,
| you may start by reading up on this as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out
| zepto wrote:
| That page simply describes how the environmental case
| against nuclear power was made _before_ climate change
| began to be taken seriously.
|
| If we didn't have to worry about the impacts of climate
| change, I'd agree with phasing out nuclear.
|
| But we do.
|
| "These pieces of criticism have however largely been
| quelled by the IPCC which indicated in 2014 that nuclear
| energy was a low carbon energy production technology,
| comparable to wind and lower than solar in that
| regard.[135]"
| ravenstine wrote:
| > It's one thing to state that you personally believe in
| something. It's an entirely different thing to try to
| pass off a personal opinion and baseless assertions as
| some kind of established consensus, particluarly as they
| fly in the face of reality.
|
| That's exactly what you are doing. To be honest, I can't
| tell if you're serious because all you are doing is
| making statements and then just linking to pages without
| citing any particular fact.
|
| > If you have a genuine curiosity about the subject and
| you're interested in getting up to speed on the topic,
| you may start by reading up on this as well.
|
| If you had a point to make, it wouldn't take someone
| reading a whole page to compare what is essentially two
| arguments around quantitative figures. You'd be able to
| state a counterargument with some form of rationale. Just
| linking to a page and telling me to "get started" by
| "reading up" doesn't cut it. This is a _discussion_
| forum, and it 's really not polite to just tell people
| they are wrong and not explain why. Nobody has time to
| read an entire encyclopedia entry to figure out why you
| are right and everyone else is wrong.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _That 's exactly what you are doing. To be honest, I
| can't tell if you're serious because all you are doing is
| making statements and then just linking to pages without
| citing any particular fact._
|
| No, not really. You might feel the need to ignore any of
| the sources I've cited, or even try to refute anything
| mentioned in them, but you can't pretend that the facts
| I've pointed out are baseless or even personal
| assertions.
|
| This sort of position is particularly undefendable
| considering that you're purposely turning a blind eye to
| the baseless and completely unrealistic assertion that
| sparked this thread.
|
| So,if you have any intention of actually discussing the
| topic, please stick to the facts instead of playing games
| trying to shift burdens away from your claims.
|
| > _If you had a point to make, it wouldn 't take someone
| reading a whole page (...)_
|
| Please don't try to pretend that well-supported and
| referenced facts are free to be ignored just because you
| either don't like them or prefer to ignore them.
| ravenstine wrote:
| The summation of what you are saying is that I am wrong
| because lots of people with power made an opposing
| decision and that I should just read a Wikipedia page
| because reasons.
|
| That's asinine. I could just as easily give you an Amazon
| listing for an entire book making a case for nuclear
| energy, tell you to just read that without giving an
| explanation of why, and that really wouldn't be much
| different from what you are telling me. _It proves
| nothing._
|
| Why are you even on HN if you want to avoid real
| discussion? Do you know why I and nearly everyone else
| here includes snippets from the pages they link to? It's
| because _no one has time to read that shit_ if they have
| no context.
|
| Can you even make a single point to back up your
| position? What you've shared is barely even a citation; a
| citation is usually in tandem with a piece of information
| or an abstract of the source being cited. You shared a
| _hyperlink_. Goodie for you.
|
| You know what, I don't even really care if you are right
| because you wrote as if I'm a dunce who should "get
| started" learning about the facts around the subject. Are
| you kidding me? You turned a blind eye to _my_ points and
| then have the gall to say imply I 'm ignorant because you
| have a Wikipedia page? You're being a total jerk.
|
| Instead of reducing what I said to a "personal opinion"
| that I am trying to "pass off" that is "baseless", you
| could have respectfully disagreed _even without a reason_
| and included that Wikipedia page, and there was a chance
| I might have read it. _But you had to be a jerk._ If you
| still don 't get this, then you're on the wrong website.
| cute_boi wrote:
| At the point in time I think I am really ambivalent about
| nuclear Energy. Its not just Chernobyl but Fukushima
| incident that illustrates how minuscule error in our
| calculation can create a debacle. As more countries
| starts to enjoy nuclear energy the risk will further
| increas. And Imo the main problem is we can't even
| control the nuclear meltdown waste and whole world might
| have to suffer the consequence which can be problematic
| (One example I can remember is how China was complaining
| when Japan decided to release those waste nuclear water).
|
| Is there guarantee way to construct safe nuclear plant? I
| am asking because I don't know the state of arts
| regarding nuclear power plant (I have started to hear
| about Thorium and don't know about safety and google is
| not the friend here unfortunately). If there are natural
| disasters etc., is nuclear plant robust against meltdown?
| Can we calculate the risk before hand?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| A blanket assertion that "drawbacks far outweigh
| benefits" with no rational argument behind it is not
| helpful in this discussion. The article you are replying
| to makes the case that it is, and while you have a right
| to disagree, and are even welcome to go ahead and make
| your case, you are not adding any value to this
| discussion by saying "clearly this is wrong" and just
| leaving it at that.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _This is my biggest concern as well. However it needs to be
| balanced against the alternative, which is trusting
| governments and corporations to deal with climate change in
| other ways._
|
| Isn't the alternative actually looking into renewable energy
| sources?
|
| Portraying things as either Nuclear or nothing is a false
| dillema, specially as we're seeing highly developed and
| industrialized countries such as Germany where renewables
| already cover close to half it's energy demands.
| steffen84 wrote:
| It all comes with a price, Germany has now the highest
| energy price in the World!
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-
| price...
|
| and we still have winter/fall times, where renewable energy
| is just not enough https://www.agora-
| energiewende.de/service/agorameter/chart/p...
| puchatek wrote:
| ... on a sunny and windy Sunday. But still...
| zepto wrote:
| > Isn't the alternative actually looking into renewable
| energy sources?
|
| That is trusting governments and corporations to deal with
| climate change in other ways.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _That is trusting governments and corporations to deal
| with climate change in other ways._
|
| Again, that's a false dillema.
|
| At best, Nuclear is being pushed as one of many possible
| alternative to fossil fuels, and one which has been
| discarded entailing both high costs (direct and
| externalities) and high risk.
| zepto wrote:
| You can keep saying it's a false dilemma, but that
| doesn't make it so. We are considering nuclear vs not
| doing nuclear. That isn't a false dilemma.
|
| > discarded entailing both high costs (direct and
| externalities) and high risk.
|
| If you are satisfied with the alternatives and think they
| are on track without nuclear, that is a happy belief to
| hold.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _You can keep saying it's a false dilemma, but that
| doesn't make it so._
|
| How exactly is the attempt to frame the problem as either
| adopting Nuclear or else climate change happens not a
| false dilemma? Are there no other energy sources? Should
| we intentionally turn a blind eye to real-world example
| of countries which are both phasing out Nuclear and
| lowering emissions towards zero?
|
| > _If you are satisfied with the alternatives and think
| they are on track without nuclear, that is a happy belief
| to hold._
|
| Again with the false dilemma angle? You might have strong
| opinions regarding how fast the current phase-out is
| going, but you can't ignore the fact that some nations,
| like Germany, are managing to meet their targets while
| phasing out Nuclear. Even so, Nuclear is obviously not
| the only option to ramp up energy production to phase out
| fossil fuels.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > you can't ignore the fact that some nations, like
| Germany, are managing to meet their targets while phasing
| out Nuclear.
|
| What targets? Germany now has an energy crisis on their
| hands that can't be mitigated with renewables, and they
| fall back on coal and gas.
| cletus wrote:
| > Governments and corporations have not responded to climate
| change adequately
|
| This is something that's both true and untrue. On the face of
| it, it's absolutely true. But what are governments, really?
| They're a reflection of the people they govern. So
| governments haven't responded because it simply isn't a
| priority for most people.
|
| I've long held the view that we'll only have a solution to
| climate change when it becomes economic to do so. The
| pandemic has only strengthened that view. We have millions of
| people who won't even mildly inconvenience themselves to help
| stop others ( _and themselves_ ) from getting seriously ill
| or dying.
|
| And you want those same people to do something about climate
| change?
|
| By "economic" I mean we simply need cheaper sources of energy
| than fossil fuels. That could be because something else gets
| cheaper, fossil fuels due to scarcity simply get more
| expensive or some combination of the two.
|
| The biggest hope for that currently seems to be solar, which
| has seen its price plummet in the last 20 years.
|
| We already have the technology to make fuel from the air but
| there's no point burning fossil fuels to do that. If however
| your energy came from a cheaper source there is a price point
| where that would make sense. At that point, gas-guzzling
| vehicles become carbon-neutral.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > This is something that's both true and untrue. On the
| face of it, it's absolutely true. But what are governments,
| really? They're a reflection of the people they govern.
|
| This is a pretty naive assumption. There's a pretty huge
| divergence in what the voting public wants and what
| governments actually do. For example, the US voting public
| overwhelmingly wants cannabis legalization, and that is not
| even remotely a legislative priority. It's delusional to
| think the government is going to act on the desires of the
| voting public for something as economically significant as
| carbon emissions.
|
| > I've long held the view that we'll only have a solution
| to climate change when it becomes economic to do so.
|
| It'll only be obviously economic to act long after the
| damage is done, this is the problem. We had enough trouble
| rallying the government for something as short-term and
| obvious as covid, good luck showing those with huge
| political power and vested interests in the status quo that
| their short term interests are going to be a disaster in a
| few decades.
| vimy wrote:
| > 1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal
| of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results
| are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date,
| expensive; 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and
| disposal of fission waste products;
|
| Why do we even consider this a problem? For more than 50 years
| nuclear waste has been sitting above ground in warehouses.
| Nothing happened. Seems to me there is no problem and we should
| just keep doing what we're doing. Why even bother with
| expensive underground storage at this point.
| twofornone wrote:
| I think its an insidious remnant of 70s era anti-nuke
| propaganda that refuses to die. Nuclear waste is spooky,
| especially when you don't have a concept of scale, and don't
| realize that the risk from spent fuel is orders of magnitude
| lower than what's allegedly at stake.
|
| I'm surprised by how long this myth has persisted.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Our biggest issue right now is climate change, full stop.
| Nuclear power basically solves that. Currently renewables do
| not. You other points are in the noise of what global warming
| is going to do to us if we don't use the solutions that are
| available to us now. We literally need a Manhattan style
| project on even better nuclear than we currently have. We have
| plenty places where nuke waste can be stored. It takes up a
| very very small area compared to the problem that gets solved.
| adventured wrote:
| > I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain,
| inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
|
| What can they be trusted with then?
|
| National defense. Social programs, healthcare systems, tax
| collection, regulation, various infrastructure & safety
| matters.
|
| You'd have to abolish nearly all governments on the planet if
| you applied the standard across the board to their
| responsibilities and the innumerable ways they can -
| potentially - severely harm the people of a nation.
|
| Whether Europe, the US, Asia, Latin America, Africa,
| corporations already provide nearly all of the world's food
| from start to finish, and are (typically) overseen / regulated
| by the governments of the world. But they can't be trusted to
| operate nuclear power plants? That doesn't make sense.
|
| So who else is going to manage the global food supply if not
| people? (small businesses, large businesses, governments,
| whatever the case)
|
| They're also charged with overseeing drug regulations around
| the world, which can easily kill large numbers of people if
| it's not done correctly. Who should regulate and manufacture
| drugs if not people? (small businesses, large businesses,
| governments, whatever the case)
|
| Besides, nuclear power plants as a risk have nothing on good
| 'ol fashioned war. Would the plan be to take all national
| defense and all military control responsibilities away from
| governments? The point being, applied fairly, the actual
| replacement standard you're suggesting at is anarchy.
| tomp wrote:
| Invest in small-scale, distributed breeder reactors. Store
| waste (the little amount that there is) in old oil wells/mines.
| Use the resulting power to charge electric vehicles. Use excess
| power to capture CO2 into artificial gas/diesel/methane to
| power vehicles that cannot be electricised (planes, rockets,
| cars far away from civilization).
|
| The solution is right there. People just refuse to take it.
|
| _As my Zen teacher used to say: The best time to invest in
| nuclear is 50 years ago. The second best time to invest in
| nuclear is today._
| Accujack wrote:
| >Invest in small-scale, distributed breeder reactors. Store
| waste (the little amount that there is) in old oil
| wells/mines.
|
| I believe completely that nuclear power is the way forward
| for us, but your assumptions here are just bonkers.
|
| Breeder reactors of any kind are a proliferation risk. We
| also don't need them. Thorium fueled reactors are a better
| choice, both for the availability of fuel and the lowered
| risk.
|
| Storing nuclear waste in any location not designed to store
| waste is just stupid. Oil wells aren't big holes where
| nothing exists once the oil is gone, putting anything in them
| probably affects aquifers locally (see fracking). Plus to
| store waste in a well we'd have to liquify it, making it more
| likely to leak. We also would have no way to really determine
| if it's leaking or if it's not, plus no way to deal with it
| if it does leak.
|
| Mines are about as bad... even placing waste in a very
| stable, dry mine could leave it prone to escaping and
| travelling elsewhere.
|
| The problem isn't finding a place to put the stuff that's out
| of the way, it's building a place to put it that will not
| allow it to leak/migrate for a significant amount of time.
| Yucca mountain would have been good, but the NIMBY crowd is
| too afraid of waste to store it there.
|
| Fortunately, newer reactor designs produce less waste. It's
| still a concern, though, and not anywhere near as easy to
| deal with as you're making it.
| jabl wrote:
| > Breeder reactors of any kind are a proliferation risk. We
| also don't need them. Thorium fueled reactors are a better
| choice, both for the availability of fuel and the lowered
| risk.
|
| The Thorium fuel cycle is, by definition, a breeding fuel
| cycle because Th doesn't naturally contain any fissile
| isotopes. U-233, which is the fissile isotope that is the
| actual fuel in the Th cycle, is perfectly fine as a bomb
| material, so you have similar proliferation worries as with
| a U-Pu fuel cycle.
| Accujack wrote:
| Not quite similar, depending on reactor design - less
| plutonium production for one thing, and less transuranic
| waste, too.
| lodovic wrote:
| Why not send nuclear waste into space? I know it's
| expensive and risky, but we won't leave it for future
| generations to deal with.
| loeg wrote:
| It's a lot of mass to lift; current rocket fuel (RP-1 is
| kerosene) produces CO2; and rockets occasionally explode
| and distribute their contents over a wide area. Also,
| what, you want to leave a bunch of radioactive waste in
| orbit? Lifting it out of the earth's gravity well takes a
| lot of fuel, and then it's still in a near-earth solar
| orbit. No thanks.
| angeland89 wrote:
| What does 1 in 5 deaths can be attributed to fosil fuels in the
| air even mean.
|
| Give years, that's what matters. Lifespan is shortened by what
| exactly, 2 years, 10 years, 50?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments
| or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate
| nuclear power plants at scale.
|
| I trust private corporations even less when it comes to fixing
| the current problem with carbon pollution. It's going to cost
| money, and they aren't going to do it.
| andbberger wrote:
| How often do you drive over a bridge? Or get a in a building
| that could collapse on you? Or fly in a plane?
|
| That's not really so different than nuclear energy is except
| some of us have lost our collective minds and come to the
| erroneous conclusion that nuclear energy is _scary_.
|
| The climate change potential of nuclear energy goes far behind
| the direct greenhouse gas emissions from electricity
| production. With cheap abundant electricity (as could be
| produced from nuclear energy in a sane world), industrial
| processes that burn fossil fuels could be switched to
| electricity and carbon skimmers could be run.
|
| Not to mention your other concerns which I think can be aptly
| dismissed with a nice tech brain metaphor: "No wireless. Less
| space than a Nomad. Lame"
|
| Adapt or die. The water's lapping at your feet and you're
| looking at the spec sheet for a nuclear first-gen ipod and
| concluding there's nothing there.
|
| And don't even get me started on your electric vehicle hot
| take. Battery vehicles are not the answer. We here in the Us
| practice a particularly perverted form of urbanism. Gimme a
| fucking train. Gimme more trolleybuses. Gimme walkable
| neighborhoods and dense design.
|
| I am so sick of all of this bullshit, the answers are obvious
| greentissue wrote:
| Comparing a bridge or a plane to a nuclear meltdown seems
| pretty disingenuous. If a plane crashes at an airport that
| does not prevent the airport from being accessible by humans
| for 50+ years. If a bridge collapses that does not prevent
| you from building a new one at that location for 50+ years.
|
| I don't think anything they described applies only to 1st
| generation plants. They all still hold true today. The thing
| with coal and fossil fuel power is that there was not enough
| planning of the entire system. The end result was the
| production of gases directly into the environment.
|
| If we want to go down the nuclear route we need to design a
| well oiled closed looped system that can completely handle
| poking without any easily recoverable problems. There are
| many ideas in the pipeline such as molten-salt reactors.
| These take time to test, validate, and integrate into a
| cohesive system.
|
| The biggest worry for me is shortcuts and penny-saving. How
| many parts of this system will be skipped do to being "to
| costly", "not financially feasible", etc...
| collegeburner wrote:
| Dense neighborhoods kinda suck everywhere Ive seen it tho? I
| like having a backyard and not sharing walls with my
| neighbors, and having some quiet, and low crime, and not
| having to hunt for seats on buses and trains, etc.
| andbberger wrote:
| Do you like having to drive everywhere, to shops with
| massive parking lots? Or having stroads not safe for your
| kids to play on where cars blast past at 40mph?
|
| Have you been to places where they do density right? Paris
| comes to mind, as does the urban centers of the
| Netherlands.
|
| Not everyone wants to live in the city, that's cool. But
| even inherently low density suburbs in the US suck. We used
| to have walkable streetcar suburbs [0], then the car came
| along and fucked everything up.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
| splitstud wrote:
| Storage safety requires a stable civilization for a longer
| time than we can possibly guarantee. There is no obvious to
| this problem.
| andbberger wrote:
| Wrong! Wrong wrong wrong!
|
| You do the obvious thing of burying it in an unmarked,
| geologically stable hole. No silly landscape of thorns.
| Just a hole. Finland already did it [0]
|
| Take a few minutes to do some reading and purge yourself of
| your incredibly incorrect beliefs!
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel
| _repo...
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Your
| comment here is a noticeable step in that direction, and
| we're trying to go the opposite way here. I'm sure you can
| make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that
| instead.
|
| Edit: unfortunately, you've been doing this a ton lately, and
| we've had to ask you to stop before. That's not cool. We ban
| accounts that behave like this, regardless of how right they
| are or feel they are. Would you mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be
| grateful.
| sentinel wrote:
| The newer types of reactors - gen 3 are way safer than a
| Chernobyl. I.e. a meltdown could not happen
| antattack wrote:
| Safer does not mean safe however.
| tuatoru wrote:
| If it isn't perfect, it isn't good enough?
|
| Every technology has costs. Fossil fuels are killing
| hundreds of thousands and blighting the lives of tens of
| millions of asthma sufferers every year.
| loeg wrote:
| Wind turbines aren't "safe"[1]. Relative safety matters.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-
| ea...
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| > a meltdown could not happen
|
| Gen III reactors have a core catcher[1] to handle a meltdown,
| in addition to many features making a meltdown even less
| likely to happen.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher
| unchocked wrote:
| The Chernobyl exclusion zone, terrible as it is, doesn't hold a
| candle to the realities of climate change.
|
| Geological repositories are the solution for long term storage.
| They are not only technologically feasible, but actually
| constructed and waiting for use.
|
| Ignoring the solution is not the same as there being no
| solution.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Um. I'm not so sure that's accurate. Chernobyl and Fukushima
| are uninhabitable, and will be as such for _many_ years to
| come. As we increase fission reactors, risk will increase as
| well. Ironically, perhaps due to climate change.
|
| The question is: if we commit to fission, are we simply
| trading one problem disaster for another? Put another way,
| given our collective (lack of) response to CC, should our
| track record on decision making be trusted?
| himinlomax wrote:
| > Fukushima are uninhabitable
|
| What area are we taking about here, and is it truly
| inhabitable or is it just the same flawed logic that caused
| the Japanese government to evacuate the area when there was
| no sense in doing so?
| DenisM wrote:
| On one hand - uninhabitable Chernobyl, on the other hand -
| uninhabitable Earth.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| >risk will increase as well
|
| Not even close to significant amount, compared to the
| certainty of a CO2 fueled Climate disaster. Not to mention
| modern reactors are passively safe.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Climate disaster? To who? Humans? Mother Nature, on
| average isn't concerned. She adjusts. She evolves.
| History is clear on this. Radiation on the other hand is
| all but permanent. Climate disaster is a self-inflicted
| death blow by humans to humans.
| DougWebb wrote:
| _Radiation on the other hand is all but permanent._
|
| No it isn't. The purpose of a nuclear reactor is to take
| highly radioactive material found in nature, cook off a
| bunch of its radioactive energy (producing power in the
| process), and create less-radioactive material as a by-
| product. The waste that comes out at the end is _less_
| radioactive than the material we started with, albeit
| much more concentrated. But that makes it easier to
| handle and store, compared to the CO2 and other
| greenhouse gases that are spewed out all over the place.
|
| If we dumped all that radioactive waste into the ocean
| (BAD IDEA), mother nature would dilute it for us and
| spread it out until it disappears into the natural
| background radiation. The drawback is that it'll be
| dangerous to everything that encounters it before it's
| diluted, so we can't do that.
| CheezeIt wrote:
| > The waste that comes out at the end is less radioactive
| than the material we started with, albeit much more
| concentrated.
|
| This is not true. Nuclear fuel not highly radioactive.
| Their use in nuclear reactors stems from the fact that
| they emit two neutrons when hit with one, producing a
| chain reaction. Their byproducts are much more
| radioactive than the original fuel.
| simondotau wrote:
| It's also a bad idea because the "waste" might end up
| being useful/valuable to future generations. It's only
| considered waste right now because we currently have no
| purpose for it.
| merb wrote:
| it might also be a death trap for them. I mean we bury
| high toxical waste deep inside a mountain and try to
| forget it?
| onion2k wrote:
| _Climate disaster is a self-inflicted death blow by
| humans to humans._
|
| As a human that's the particular sort of disaster I care
| about most.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| That's fair. I can emphasize :) But this idea of " _we_
| need to save the planet... " is a false narrative. It
| might even be distracted and overwhelming. The Truth is,
| we need to save ourselves from us. And in that context
| it's important not to overlook that context and continue
| with our hubris-based mindset. So yeah, nuclear may or
| may not be a wise choice. Furthermore, if it isn't enough
| and we come up short on CC then we'll have _at least two_
| high priority lonlong term problems to deal with.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| >... and Fukushima are uninhabitable
|
| This is incorrect. Not only is the Fukushima prefecture
| inhabited, even the very town in which the incident
| happened is inhabited.
| goatlover wrote:
| > Chernobyl and Fukushima are uninhabitable,
|
| People choose not to live there, but plenty of wildlife
| does. Which is different from saying it's uninhabitable.
| People could live there. People haven't because an
| increased risk for cancer and birth defects. Which is a far
| cry from saying it's not livable. Chernobyl is basically a
| wild life sanctuary now. Nature is doing better off because
| of the lack of human presence.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > plenty of wildlife does
|
| Yup. And the same can we said for the planet. Mother
| Nature will adjust and bounce back. Ultimately, she's not
| at risk. We are.
|
| So if it's about wildlife, CC is not a fatal issue.
| Again, MN will persist, one way or another. CC and
| Humans? That's a differnt plot arc.
| scrose wrote:
| Climate change is leading to many insects and other
| wildlife becoming extinct
| 8note wrote:
| Natural selection will replace them with new wildlife it
| might take a while, but organisms will still live there
| dataflow wrote:
| > Chernobyl and Fukushima are uninhabitable
|
| Climate change will make much larger parts of the planet
| uninhabitable.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| The effects of Chernobyl are not limited to the exclusion
| zone. In the 100km radius zone, my family had to test all our
| food with a Geiger counter because anything grown in the area
| was poisoned.
|
| (The government made Geiger counters illegal to own, btw.)
| godelski wrote:
| Did any of your food ever have dangerous levels of
| radiation?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Yes, that is why we were testing it.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| I think I need a Geiger counter for my wife's cooking...
| gpm wrote:
| The Chernobyl exclusion zone as terrible as it is, is _very_
| far from a worst case. It 's what you get from a moderately
| bad meltdown with heroic mitigation efforts as a follow up.
| The risks are far greater than that. Holding it up and saying
| "this isn't bad" is missing that _that 's the point_, this is
| what happens in a "good" meltdown.
|
| An article describing some of it...
| https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-
| million...
| mitch3x3 wrote:
| If they would've used water as a moderator, built a
| containment building, and not allowed manual override like
| every other reactor ever, we wouldn't be having this
| conversation. It's absolutely a worst case scenario.
| DennisP wrote:
| It's also what you get from a reactor with no containment
| dome, unlike every modern reactor.
|
| On top of that, the Chernobyl reactor had a strong positive
| feedback: as the temperature went up, the reaction sped up.
| Modern reactors do the opposite.
| Retric wrote:
| Only up to a point. Modern designs tend to be short term
| passively safe, but shut off the pumps and radioactive
| decay alone can be enough to eventually cause a melt down
| in many modern designs. Which is the core issue, there's
| a huge cost trade off for protection vs every possible
| issue no matter how remote.
|
| Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of
| this. They haven't caused a major issue yet but they're
| potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.
| chasil wrote:
| I know that molten salt reactors have a "salt plug" at
| the bottom of the tank that will melt if the temperature
| is too high, dumping the liquid fuel into a boron bath.
|
| I think this kind of reactor is safe in a way that no
| modern reactor is - operators can remove all power and
| walk away in this shutdown state. This isn't possible
| with modern reactors, where 6% of the heat that they
| produce comes from daughter nuclei, and this decay heat
| requires cooling power for months after a controlled
| shutdown.
|
| I do agree, we have to build these safely, with every
| conceivable scenario, such that walking away is possible.
|
| Converting to thorium fuel would also be far better, as
| there is only one stable isotope in nature, so no refing
| is necessary (beyond high-purity smelting), and no
| centrifuges.
| koheripbal wrote:
| No. Modern reactors use their pumps to keep the reactor
| going. Shut them off and the reactor shuts itself off.
|
| They now all have passive safety systems that do not
| require power.
| godelski wrote:
| The Soviets were the only ones that built reactors that
| way. As in, having the ability to blow up.
|
| > Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of
| this. They haven't caused a major issue yet but they're
| potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.
|
| I think you're also over estimating the danger here.
| We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years.
| That's some pretty good statistical power.
| Retric wrote:
| First pools are shared between reactors so there's
| probably only around 200 that have ever been built.
|
| Also, the risk isn't simply in year X for pool Y, it's
| for every pool and every year. At best we can estimate
| the risk of a pool over it's lifetime is probably under
| 2% and the risk from all pools is also under 2% in any
| given year. The risk of any pool over the next 50 years,
| now that we have very little hard data on. At least in
| terms of real world data ir could be 0.05% or 50% and we
| just don't have enough real world data to validate.
|
| Edit: You can scroll through this list but it looks like
| on average there's around 3 reactors per location. https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| >shut off the pumps and radioactive decay alone can be
| enough to eventually cause a melt down in many modern
| designs
|
| The newest designs being built worldwide use natural
| circulation cooling and do not need cooling pumps in
| emergencies. Eventually the cooling pool needs to be
| refilled, but it's external to the containment pressure
| boundary, so you could refill it with a fire truck.
| Retric wrote:
| Natural circulation gets heat from a reactor to X, but
| now your dependent on X. This often seems like a trivial
| detail, but Fukushima failed 3 days after the earthquake.
|
| The issue is you want several things from a passive
| system at the same time, don't lose heat in normal
| operation, quickly lose multiple GW of heat in an
| emergency and as much as 200+MW of heat for days after a
| shutdown. The obvious solution is to have a tank of water
| that boils if the reactor temperature gets to high, but
| now you need to keep that tank full.
|
| Thus many designs result in a reactor that is passively
| safe for some number of hours and at risk after that.
| They describe this as a passively safe reactor even if
| it's got external dependencies.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Nope.
|
| Decay heat is below a half percent of operating after
| about a day. So 200 MW decay heat days later would mean a
| 40GW (thermal) reactor.
|
| That's about ten times larger than the largest reactors
| in existence today.
|
| Also, watts measure power, not heat.
| Retric wrote:
| Watts is joules per second be that electricity,
| horsepower, or heat.
|
| Passive systems can't assume a successful shutdown.
| petre wrote:
| One could use pumps for increased efficiency during
| normal operation but the idea is that natural circulation
| should be able to remove all the heat if the reactor is
| SCRAMed. NuScale's design for instance only uses pumps
| for the steam generator, the rest is handled by natural
| circulation and the reactor sits in a water pool that
| needs to be replenished after two weeks in case of a
| major accident.
| [deleted]
| spfzero wrote:
| Realistically, it _was_ the worst case as modern designs
| are much safer. What are you imagining would be the very-
| far worse case and how would that arise?
|
| I'd argue Fukushima was a worst-case scenario with a Gen-3
| commercial plant.
| agumonkey wrote:
| seems like the debate is still polarizing.. either there
| were not enough engineering improvement, or bad
| communication to settle the issue
| gpm wrote:
| It's not a question of engineering improvement. The
| comment at the top of this thread said it fairly well:
|
| > 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust
| governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage
| and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
|
| I'd add "design" and "construct" to that list as well.
|
| I have pretty much no doubt that it's theoretically
| possible to design, construct, maintain and operate a
| safe reactor, I don't believe for an instant though that
| the decision making authorities are capable of actually
| requiring in perpetuity that those things and only those
| things are done despite the huge financial incentives to
| cut corners and play the 1-in-a-million catastrophic
| failure lottery.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I'll take the risk of some nuclear reactor accidents
| compared to the inevitability of world wide calamity and
| wars that will happen because of climate changes and
| resource limits. It's going to be some risk vs
| inevitability because the world is not going to change
| from fossil fuels until it's too late.I don't live some
| magic reality where the hippies win and we all will
| embrace each other and be responsible rather than be the
| tribal apes that we really all are.
| shawnz wrote:
| The amount of coal necessary to replace nuclear fuel is
| about a million times greater. Do you trust those
| governments to handle 1000000x as much fossil fuel as
| nuclear? Especially consider the fact that such a large
| amount of coal has roughly equally as much natural
| radioactive contaminants as the amount of nuclear fuel
| that could replace it.
| gpm wrote:
| This is a poor argument, you're comparing nuclear to
| literally the worst alternative you can think of.
|
| The alternative to building new nuclear plants is not
| building new coal plants, or keeping existing coal plants
| in use for longer. It's to take the same money that you
| could have spent on new nuclear power plants, and to
| spend them on new power plants of other types. If it's a
| fossil fuel form in the modern era, that probably means
| gas (16% of new power generation in the US), not coal (0%
| of new capacity I believe, rather quickly being
| retired/converted to natural gas). More likely it means
| solar (39%) or wind (31%).
|
| (Source for numbers:
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416)
|
| But yes, I trust our society to handle coal (and other
| fossil fuels) more than I trust it to handle nuclear
| plants, because you can't hide the effects of fossil
| fuels, but you can hide (and deny) the negative effects
| of a unsafe nuclear plant until it fails
| catastrophically.
| godelski wrote:
| > you can't hide the effects of fossil fuels, but you can
| hide (and deny) the negative effects of a unsafe nuclear
| plant until it fails catastrophically.
|
| What? The subtopic of the thread is climate change. That
| was hidden from the public eye for over 30 years. We're
| literally in the situation where fossil fuels have failed
| catastrophically and now everyone knows about it. Which
| I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate because a large
| portion of the population is still denying it.
|
| So yeah, this is a poor argument.
| [deleted]
| spfzero wrote:
| What is your idea of a catastrophic failure? A nuclear
| detonation? Because that actually can't happen. Not
| because there is some gizmo preventing it that might one
| day fail, but because it actually, physically can not
| happen.
|
| Is it a meltdown? That has already happened at Fukushima,
| and didn't end up being catastrophic. At least not
| compared to catastrophes like tsunamis and earthquakes.
| dboreham wrote:
| Analysis of the Chernobyl accident suggests that this is
| not quite true
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.201
| 7.1...
| gpm wrote:
| It's described in the article I linked in the comment two
| above, I'll link it again here. A steam explosion
| spreading orders of magnitude more radiation than
| Chernobyl had already (which was prevented by people
| entering the reactor in the days immediately after the
| first explosion).
|
| https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-
| million...
|
| Incidentally, nuclear detonations can happen, and there
| is some belief that very small ones _did_ happen in
| Chernobyl, but the type of the explosion is really
| besides the point.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I quite agree with the dubious government skill levels in
| general, but considering the task I'd say they made a
| decent run for a first era so far. 3 big catastrophes
| (not good not terrible).
|
| Question would be, can we raise the safety levels one
| order up ?
|
| Also in a way, we will face that soon because the current
| fleet will have to be replaced by something one way or
| another.
| godelski wrote:
| >> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust
| governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage
| and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
|
| If this is the coup d'etat then there's no argument.
| Because if you don't trust them for this then how can you
| trust them for anything? That's fair, not having trust.
| But at least be consistent.
| lasc4r wrote:
| Aren't there fail-safe designs for newer reactors? Whatever
| tiny risk exists would be worth taking IMO.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Failsafe fission is a myth, it depends on accidents
| happening according to the design when everything is
| built and maintained perfectly. Fukushima was failsafe
| until a tsunami flooded the backup generators. The danger
| of tsunami was dully noted of course but as it turns out
| electricity supply to the reactor cooling wasn't all that
| failsafe.
|
| The passive systems? They all depend on large groups of
| people doing their job perfectly during the manufacturing
| and another group of people doing their jobs perfectly at
| maintaining these systems and not disabling them when
| inconvenient. I don't trust people doing everything right
| every single time.
|
| The fission reaction is a kind of a reaction that can go
| out of control very fast spontaneously.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm not against nuclear energy but I
| think it must be treated as something we can do until we
| switch to something sustainable.
|
| I tried to find marketing material for Chernobyl and
| Fukushima but I did not find anything, I wanted to see if
| they explained the risks or did they described these
| plants as perfectly safe. People now claim that those
| designs were flawed and that everyone knew about it but I
| don't believe it, I will be shocked if people were
| promised anything less than perfect safety.
|
| As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors
| and 2(actually more as fukushima lost multiple reactors)
| of those went bust with significant damage to the
| communities close to the reactors. The body count is hard
| to pinpoint but large communities had their lives
| uprooted and everything could have went worse if we
| lacked heroes.
|
| With currently %10 of our electricity is coming from
| Nuclear, in 60 years we had 2 regions becoming
| uninhabitable practically forever due to incidents that
| could have been much worse. If our track record remains
| in line, with %100 nuclear we can expect to have 20 more
| places ruined within the lifetime of a junior developer
| who just started today.
|
| I don't know, maybe we can have nuclear power plants
| close to photovoltaic production facilities to offset the
| energy need when building those far away from densely
| populated places and ramp up our efforts to switch to the
| fusion reactor in the sky? Turn off the last nuclear
| power plant when we have enough solar energy equipment?
| jason0597 wrote:
| > As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors
| and 2 of those went bust with significant damage to the
| communities close to the reactors. The body count is hard
| to pinpoint but large communities had their lives
| uprooted and everything could have went worse if we
| lacked heroes.
|
| You could very easily make the same argument about
| climate change. What about the Amazon fires, Australia
| fires, California fires? The floods in Germany? Countless
| people had their lives uprooted from climate change
| (which was caused by many things, including CO2 emitting
| electricity generation)
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I don't think any of the people who are sceptic about
| fission are pro-fossil-fuels.
|
| I, for example, see the future in renewables plus
| storage, distributed and optimized for the local
| situation.
|
| I accept fission as something necessary right now to buy
| time.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong and fission is the better answer than
| renewables, but long term I feel like it's the same can
| of worms that fossil fuel was all over again.
|
| I just hope we can make smart decisions that help us
| fight climate change short, mid and long-term.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I largely agree but I think people who run nuclear power
| stations are well aware of Chernobyl and will not make
| similar mistakes.
| derac wrote:
| This assumes that nuclear power plants aren't getting any
| safer.
| visarga wrote:
| The other energy sources have risks and fatalities, you
| got to weigh the options against nuclear, can't judge it
| by itself.
| splitstud wrote:
| The other energy sources don't require stable societies a
| thousand years from now.
| spfzero wrote:
| Lots of things depend on everyone doing their job mostly
| perfectly, and then inspections and tests, etc. to make
| sure. Chemical plants, oil platforms, airplanes, etc. We
| should expect the occasional accident, which there have
| been for all power generation technologies. Nuclear is
| one of the very safest, by far, if you account for all of
| the accidents to date.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| > we had 2 regions becoming uninhabitable practically
| forever due to incidents that could have been much worse.
|
| are they really uninhabitable forever? The nature seems
| to have returned to Chernobyl, there are still people
| living there who defied the evacuation order. Sure, as a
| precaution the exclusion zone makes sense, but to call it
| uninhabitable practically forever is a stretch.
| gjm11 wrote:
| No, it's flatly false unless "region" is being used in a
| highly misleading way. There are about 2500 people living
| right now in the town of Okuma where the Fukushima
| Daiichi reactor was located.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ckuma,_Fukushima
| gpm wrote:
| I'm pretty sure every reactor ever designed was designed
| to fail safely. Including Chernobyl...
|
| I don't trust humans to design and maintain things that
| _actually_ always fail safely though. Eventually someone
| is going to do something dumb and cut the wrong corner
| or, just do something dumb like disable the emergency
| core cooling system as part of a test of another system
| (what caused Chernobyl...)
|
| In a perfect world fission power could be used safely,
| the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds
| main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're
| actually perfect now".
| junon wrote:
| Chernobyl had an unsafe design from the beginning and the
| engineers knew it.
| merb wrote:
| fukushima as well, heck even the governement did know
| that. that does not make it better. in fact that makes it
| worse.
| bumby wrote:
| It seems to be a combination of poor design and not
| following operational procedures to manage the poor
| design.
|
| https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-
| sec...
| [deleted]
| philwelch wrote:
| > In a perfect world fission power could be used safely,
| the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds
| main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're
| actually perfect now".
|
| This isn't a criticism of nuclear power; it's a criticism
| of industrial civilization and technological progress.
| You can make the exact same point about coal mining,
| lithium mining, power grids, hell, even campfires if you
| wanted to.
|
| If I went and dug up horror stories about what happened
| before we had an electrical code and used those horror
| stories to argue that we shouldn't have electricity
| inside our homes, it would be perfectly reasonable to
| say, "that's why we have electrical codes". And I don't
| think it would be a strong counter for me to say, "but
| the electrical code isn't _perfect_ ".
| gpm wrote:
| It's not a criticism or all technological progress, it's
| a criticism of technology where you cannot accept a
| single worst case failure, as is the case with nuclear
| power plants and very little else.
|
| If an electrical fault in your house meant killings 10s
| or hundreds of millions of people, instead of costing you
| a home (and if you're really unlucky single digit numbers
| of lives) we'd be foolish to allow it. As it turns out,
| electrical faults in a house only burns down the house,
| not the continent.
| godelski wrote:
| One might even say that we have no long term waste storage
| solution for fossil fuels or other greenhouse gas emitting
| sources.
|
| I'd also say that the climate zone is much larger and
| deadlier than the Chernobyl zone.
| spfzero wrote:
| The long-term storage solution we're using now for CO2, is
| to put it into the atmosphere. Putting that there is much
| worse than putting radioactive waste deep underground in a
| stable salt formation. It's even worse than letting the
| nuclear plant waste sit around in open water tanks, as we
| do now.
| selimnairb wrote:
| We are also inadvertently putting it into the ocean,
| which in some ways is worse than putting it in the
| atmosphere (acidification).
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I think that was his point.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| ok, well I hear that a lot but does anyone have the figures
| of how many Chernobyl zones would be expected if all of the
| fossil fuel usage was replaced with nuclear?
|
| we might start from https://world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/current-and-fu... and
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2020/06/20/bp-review-
| ne...
|
| but then questions become - does increasing power
| generation via nuclear improve or make the systems worse -
| because maybe the sites we have now are the best of the
| best and we get more we no longer have the best of the
| best.
|
| Final question - is there perhaps any sort of interplay
| from multiple Chernobyl like incidents possible? In the
| same way that the increase of fossil fuel usage went beyond
| just local pollution to climate change.
|
| But yeah, fossil fuel usage providing almost all of
| humanity's energy needs over a century has damaged the
| environment much more than a much shorter period and much
| more limited nuclear power usage has.
|
| on edit: I am in fact a proponent of increasing nuclear
| power usage - just these arguments I see about Chernobyl
| not being that bad in comparison to climate change are not
| that impressive without some extrapolation and hard
| science.
| godelski wrote:
| > how many Chernobyl zones would be expected if all of
| the fossil fuel usage was replaced with nuclear?
|
| Honestly? Roughly 1. The reason Chernobyl blew up is
| difficult to explain to people that don't have a lot of
| background in nuclear physics. In addition to this, no
| western country built reactors that even had the ability
| to explode.
|
| So a better question would be about Fukushima like zones
| (yeah, there is a bit of a difference. Their exclusion
| zone is smaller and won't last as long). This is also
| pretty unlikely and very difficult to calculate. Some
| people over estimate the damage from Fukushima, some
| under. Again, it is hard to explain to non-experts. It's
| not only nuclear physics, a tough enough subject as is,
| but also a lot of geology, medicine, and more. The
| simplest way to put the Fukushima accident is that it was
| caused by a never before seen earthquake (and subsequent
| tsunami) and one that was not predicted possible. Now,
| science did advance and this possibility was learned
| about, but it was a little too late. A typical response
| to this is that we also don't know what can happen in the
| future, but this is also naive because we've clearly
| gotten better.
|
| There's been close to 700 reactors built and only 2 had
| major accidents. That's less than half a percent.
| Supposing we had 10k reactors that would put us at 30.
| But this is naive for the reasons given/implied to above.
| The honest answer is probably less than 10. But it is
| again hard to calculate because that estimate is based on
| current climate conditions and assuming events like
| Katrina are common. But I think this is still a high
| estimate because even the Indian ocean earthquake didn't
| cause such a disaster at India's Chennai reactor. My more
| honest guess is 3. But this is even hard because it's
| based on black swan events and in addition to that
| climate wouldn't be as big of a problem as it is today if
| we had continued to build reactors in the 80's. We also
| have assumed that such production wouldn't have increased
| safety measures like we see in Gen IV and Gen V reactors.
| Which if those were around, then I don't think we would
| have an additional one and I don't think Fukushima would
| have happened. So 1.
|
| The truth is that asking this question is impossible to
| answer and not really that fruitful. It is abundantly
| clear that the 2 accidents that have happened were black
| swan events. Only Chernobyl was (somewhat meaningfully)
| predictable. We still don't know how to predict black
| swan events because by definition they are rare. We can't
| give a meaningful answer to your question.
|
| And yeah, I agree. It is very clear that Chernobyl is
| less bad than climate change. Nature is still thriving in
| Chernobyl and Fukushima. Just humans aren't. And that
| might not be such a bad thing (though obviously it is bad
| for all the people that were displaced).
| [deleted]
| weaksauce wrote:
| the op seems to be missing the fact that the waste from
| fossil fuels is the thing that is causing the climate
| change. we definitely don't have a good long term waste
| solution for that.
| godelski wrote:
| Honestly I think a lot of people miss this. Similarly
| people will look at full cycle for nuclear but not for
| renewables. Nor include batteries or other storage
| systems. First order approximations aren't good enough to
| let us even approximate an understanding of what is
| arguably the most difficult problem in human history.
| konspence wrote:
| False dichotomy of saying we have the consequences of climate
| change OR we have a few Chernobyl like incidents.
|
| We don't need to choose between these options. We can avoid
| climate change without nuclear energy
| goatlover wrote:
| That's easy to say, but how do we accomplish it without
| nuclear?
| runarberg wrote:
| I can just as easily ask: "how do we accomplish it _with_
| nuclear?"
|
| The answer--off course--is the same in either case. We
| build the infrastructure. Renewables and nuclear both
| require a tremendous amount of infrastructure. Much of
| this infrastructure would even be the same in either case
| since we need to move from fossil fuel power to
| electricity (e.g. electrify rail lines, build high speed
| train, etc.)
|
| There is off course difference in the electricity
| generation. Nuclear relies on building really big and
| expensive plants in locations far away from the
| consumption. Each design is unique and will take a while
| from plan to delivery. Renewables on the other hand, have
| the benefits of diversity of design. It can be
| distributed and centralized, build far away or close to
| consumption.
|
| It seems to me that if you want to avoid the climate
| disaster, doing it without nuclear is actually the
| easier/more realistic option.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The answer--off course--is the same in either case. We
| build the infrastructure.
|
| No. The answer isn't the same. Renewables have one
| inescapable design flaw: they can't provide _baseline_
| power, and we can 't store energy effectively.
|
| You got no wind, no sun? Your power grid is dead with
| renewables. Nuclear (and cola, and gas) will keep going.
| goatlover wrote:
| We know nuclear provides baseline power, but we don't
| know how renewables can do so. Therefore, it makes sense
| to go with what is already known than to hope investments
| in renewable will work for baseline power.
| nicoburns wrote:
| But what we need is not baseline power, it's load
| following power. And both nuclear and renewables struggle
| with this.
|
| Nuclear can solve this by overbuilding and reducing power
| output at non-peak times. Renewables by overbuilding by
| and augmenting with storage. Both are proven
| technologies, both are expensive. I don't really see that
| nuclear has an advantage here.
| dmitriid wrote:
| What storage? There's no storage that can hold enough
| power to offset times when renewables are not working.
|
| Overbuilding renewables doesn't help with baseline
| either.
| lisper wrote:
| > We can avoid climate change without nuclear energy
|
| How?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Massive investments in renewables, capping your personal
| energy budget to something reasonable rather than what
| you can afford from a financial perspective, aiming for
| energy neutrality in buildings (doable, I've seen
| demonstration setups in the early 2000's).
|
| And even then: we can no longer avoid climate change, you
| can take that to the bank. The very best we can do is
| limit the impact of the climate change that is inevitable
| now.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| "capping your energy budget" is a non-starter. I oppose
| it, the majority opposes it, and this is a good way of
| getting kicked out of power and then having even your
| realistic policies rolled back. Unless you're the type of
| person who enjoys being right rather than being
| effective, you'll make reasonable proposals that have a
| chance of being enacted, rather than unreasonable
| proposals that lose elections.
|
| The future is one of cheap, abundant energy, that is
| growing in use. It is one of increasing industrialization
| and output. Increasing consumption and production. If you
| can't find a way to get there, then you'll be left behind
| as the rest of the world chooses a different path.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, god forbid we would enact realistic policies. No,
| instead, let's stick our heads in the sand and kick the
| bucket down the road a generation. That's worked so well
| so far.
|
| Elections are great, right up to the point where you are
| going to have to make very harsh decisions affecting the
| majority. I predict our democratic institutions will be a
| casualty of climate change long before we will allow
| ourselves to become overwhelmed by climate change itself.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Yes, god forbid we would enact realistic policies.
|
| What's your realistic policy for energy storage that's
| _required_ for renewables?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Offloading the problem to the consumer. If you want power
| continuity then you will have to provide it yourself. If
| you want reliable power that will be available but a
| significant premium over the unreliable version, and
| there will be a limited supply of that reliable power.
|
| Pumped storage where available will help a lot, grid
| scale battery systems are nowhere near powerful enough to
| take on a significant fraction of the worlds powersupply
| so we'll have to make do.
|
| Rationing of critical resources has many historical
| precedents, it's time we realized that power is not
| infinitely available at will, even though we would very
| much like it to be that way.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Capping total energy usage is not realistic. It's never
| happened in human history. It's not going to happen in
| the future. No one in any position of power has even
| proposed it. You are putting your head in the sand if you
| think that this is what will happen.
|
| GDP will grow. Energy usage per capita will grow.
| Technology will increase. Output and consumption will
| increase. That is what we do, as a species, as we try to
| improve our condition. Trying to say that "oh, we'll just
| stop and cap energy use" is not only unrealistic, but
| it's impossible to achieve, because any nation that does
| that will just be outcompeted by rival nations that
| don't. Then people will flee to the sane nation while the
| insane nation collapses.
|
| I get that some people on the green fringe don't like
| industrialization, but opposing rising living standards,
| rising output, all of which require rising energy usage,
| is always a losing proposition.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Capping total energy usage is not realistic. It's never
| happened in human history.
|
| In a sense, it has happened, but not in the form of an
| explicit mandate but just due to pre-existing
| technological and economic trends. Here is a graph of
| "Primary Energy Consumption per capita" for various
| countries, showing that the EU, US, and Canada have all
| passed their peak:
|
| https://energsustainsoc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118
| 6/s...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Capping total energy usage is not only realistic, if
| you're under 35 you will see it in your lifetime unless
| fusion becomes a reality.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I guarantee you that energy use is going to grow at about
| 3% per annum over the next 50 years. After that, it will
| most likely increase.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41433
|
| If we discover cheap fusion, that number will go up.
|
| Oh, and people will still be eating beef, driving
| personal automobiles, flying planes, sending rockets into
| space, and powering factories, too.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Your ability to predict the future must have made you a
| fortune.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I've done alright. But capital markets are usually much
| more sane than internet message boards, so it's not like
| there is a lot of financial opportunity by saying obvious
| things, it's only when you meet someone steeped in
| irreality that telling the truth becomes a radical act.
| lisper wrote:
| It seems a bit peculiar to respond to the question "how
| can we avoid climate change without nuclear energy?" by
| advocating renewables and then following that with "we
| can no longer avoid climate change." Maybe we _can_ avoid
| climate change _with_ nuclear energy even though we can
| 't without it. And even if we can't avoid it under any
| circumstances, maybe we can mitigate the net negative
| consequences more effectively with nuclear than without.
| jacquesm wrote:
| We can't avoid it. We will be able to mitigate, and
| nuclear will help with mitigation, but it's a means to an
| end, and not 'our best bet', just one of many bets, and
| hopefully one that will pay off in time. But weighing the
| alternatives of investing every $ into renewables rather
| than into nuclear for a much more immediate pay-off is a
| difficult matter, hence the all-out push of the nuclear
| lobby. And as for the 'solar and wind' lobby, it exists,
| but is far less powerful.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > Massive investments in renewables
|
| Massive investments will be made either way, either in
| replacing worn-out fossil fuel plant or in renewables.
| The cost is a given.
|
| Renewables look cheaper: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinio
| n/articles/2021-09-23/biden-...
| TheCondor wrote:
| Yucca Mountain is sort of ready but the state doesn't want
| waste to be moved there and more and a few places don't want
| the waste transferred through them to get there.
|
| I think if nuclear energy is to be part of the solution here,
| as things are we have to plan for indefinite storage of waste
| on site with the energy production. And ideally we could
| minimize waste or process it in to such a state as it could
| conceivably be transported somewhere else but those costs
| undermine the profitability of energy production as it is.
| bumby wrote:
| I wonder if there is a political solution to the storage
| problem. What if GHG externalities are taxed in a way that
| can be shuttled to those areas, like NV and NM, that can
| provide part of the nuclear solution? That might make the
| Yucca Mountains and WIPPs more palatable while also
| incentivizing more, better storage solutions.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| In the case of Yucca Mountain, a number of proposals were
| floated to give concessions to the State of Nevada in
| return for cooperation. There was a proposal put forward
| a couple decades ago to allow storage in exchange for
| returning unused Federal land to State control. ~85% of
| Nevada (and increasing) is Federally controlled. This
| creates significant economic problems for Nevada due to
| the practical restrictions on growth and land use. Most
| of this land has no Federal purpose and is not actively
| managed, it is simply under Federal control and subject
| to their whims that change with each administration,
| creating a sparse patchwork of private property the use
| of which effectively requires Federal permission.
|
| This proposal was flatly rejected by the Federal
| government, even though it would have come at no cost
| (indeed, it would have saved money by reducing
| administration costs of land they have no purpose for in
| any case). Generally speaking, the Federal government has
| been unwilling to grant any concessions to States for
| taking the nuclear waste.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| 1/ UF6 is not a necessary byproduct (only if you go through
| gaseous diffusion or centrifugal separation). Laser-based
| enrichment methods are, while not industry ready yet, very
| efficient. If we had more research and weren't forced to sleep
| on it for years, we could have made more progress.
|
| 2. We do. It's called breeder reactors (The Phenix and
| Superphenix projects in France for example, were used for
| research, produced energy, and were closed because of political
| maneuvres). As for the rest... Burying is legitimately the best
| option. 150 years of nuclear waste (planning for future use)
| can easily be buried in underground complexes, with the ability
| to pull things out should research advance.
|
| 3. Modern reactors designs need active energy input to keep the
| reaction going. Said input it decoupled from the reactor
| itself, preventing things from going wild. Your only example is
| Chernobyl 40 years ago, as the USSR were swaying their dicks
| around and trying to show who has the biggest. And before
| anything, no, Fukushima is not a disaster. Yes, people were
| evacuated (as a matter of safety), but as it stands, you get
| more radiation taking a flight than being next to it.
|
| 4. Cool, that's why countries don't give that up to
| governments. Taking France as example, the ASN is a fully
| independent entity. They have the ability to unilaterally shut
| down reactors at the most minimal event, and every single event
| is listed for everyone to see. They are the very reason our EPR
| is taking a super long time to build, because of the insane
| security requirements.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Transportation seems to be about 29%, so as we go electric that
| becomes >50%.
|
| Though seems cheaper and easier to just build more solar, wind
| etc
| fighterpilot wrote:
| You say the Chernobyl failure mode is "huge", but I would argue
| the opposite. If you compare the number of deaths across types
| of energy, nuclear is only slightly higher than solar/wind
| (about 2x) but when compared to deaths due to fossil fuel it's
| effectively zero. The big picture must be kept in mind. The
| other thing to note is that nuclear reactor design has improved
| a lot since Chernobyl, so it's not honest to say that the
| probability of that incident occurring again hasn't declined
| substantially. You can also build the plant far away from
| cities and send the power via lines fairly efficiently, if you
| must reduce an extremely small risk to a zero risk situation.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think a more accurate comparison would be number of deaths
| per unit of electricity generated. Yes, in absolute numbers,
| there have been more deaths due to fossil fuel burning, but
| we've also generated a hell of a lot more electricity by
| burning fossil fuels then we have anything else.
|
| I suspect nuclear will still come out as being safer, but I
| think we should be a bit more rigorous with how we do
| comparisons.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| The data I was referring to is already normalized in that
| way:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| I don't believe an honest person can look at that chart and
| think nuclear safety is a a real problem, especially since
| the majority of those nuclear deaths were with old reactor
| designs. It seems like one of those misplaced, irrational
| fears like fear of flying.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| I believe you are making a logical mistake. The chart
| only shows what has happened, which has no relation to
| what might happen.
|
| To make a simple analogy - No matter how many times you
| walk blindly into a busy street without getting hit by a
| car it is still dangerous to do so.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| There is that, but we KNOW what is going to happen with
| climate change. People are not going to change their ways
| before it's too late. We LOVE energy, and upcoming
| countries are only going to use more fossil fuel and it's
| going to get worse. Unless there is a 10x increase in our
| capabilities in renewables in the next 10 years we're
| done.
| borski wrote:
| I agree with you in general, but I think the massive failure
| mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths
| of land in the world entirely uninhabitable by humans.
|
| I also agree the probability is way lower now, but the
| failure mode is huge nonetheless.
| loeg wrote:
| > I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and
| more about making large swaths of land in the world
| entirely uninhabitable by humans.
|
| Are you talking about the land required by solar/wind
| generation? I wouldn't say it makes it uninhabitable by
| humans, but I wouldn't want to live under a big turbine.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| don't have the numbers on hand, but if you compare energy
| output per acres, wind/solar farms are no competition to
| nuclear. I wonder what those numbers look like once you
| amortize those failure modes.
| [deleted]
| onepointsixC wrote:
| In fear of making small area's of land uninhabitable by
| humans for a short period of time, we are making the entire
| planet uninhabitable by humans permanently.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There is also the fact that the "small, cheap" nuclear reactor
| has never really happened in a commercial context. I have
| literally heard about those since my childhood and one has
| actually yet to happen.
|
| The current very large nuclear plants are expensive to build
| (the ones that have opened on time and on budget are the
| exception, not the rule).
| loeg wrote:
| The US Navy regularly buys small, cheap reactors for
| submarines and carriers.
| pjscott wrote:
| Most of the recent construction of large nuclear plants is in
| China, and they're actually doing quite well at building them
| on time. The ones that are super late and over budget are the
| exception worldwide; they just make the news more often.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea.
| ..
| orwin wrote:
| Nuclear plants in SK are on time as well, which is quite
| impressive since they did not have as much training. I
| guess just having a good plan is enough.
| diordiderot wrote:
| > have literally heard about those since my childhood and one
| has actually yet to happen.
|
| What's your point?
| hikingsimulator wrote:
| My own take on this state of affair is that I would trade a
| localized, visible and accountable (in all meanings of the
| term) pollution with our current globalized, amorphous and
| invisible (for now and still...) pollution that will lead to
| terrifying effects down the line (given some are already
| there).
|
| Nuclear is not clean per se, but in scale, it is much, much
| more preferable.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| 1000 square miles is the area of a square 33 miles on a side.
| Assuming it's in a remote place, it's nothing relative to a
| aworldwide climate disaster. (If it were in a highly populated
| area, that would be a tragedy -- but surely nobody is going to
| put a nuclear plant next to a city.)
| cletus wrote:
| You mean other like within 50 miles of New York City [1][2]?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center
|
| [2]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-you-
| live-wi...
| fallingknife wrote:
| > 1 We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal
| of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results
| are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date,
| expensive;
|
| We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of
| coal mining waste.
|
| > 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal
| of fission waste products;
|
| We don't even have a short term solution to the storage and
| disposal of combustion waste products.
|
| > 3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl
| Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years
| after the fact; and
|
| The failure modes of hydrocarbon based power are huge. Most
| notably cooking the entire planet, which stands at 197,000,000
| square miles.
|
| > 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments
| or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate
| nuclear power plants at scale.
|
| The US government and corporations have managed all of the
| nuclear reactors in the US so far without any significant
| failures (3 Mile Island is not significant).
| nuerow wrote:
| > _The failure modes of hydrocarbon based power are huge.
| Most notably cooking the entire planet, which stands at
| 197,000,000 square miles._
|
| It's a good thing then that hydrocarbon-based power is being
| phased out as well. For example, the EU just announced their
| target to eliminate emissions by 2050.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-unveils-
| plan...
| jabl wrote:
| Governments around the world are competing in announcing
| ever more ambitious climate targets. Would be nice if they
| would also walk the walk.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _Governments around the world are competing in
| announcing ever more ambitious climate targets. Would be
| nice if they would also walk the walk._
|
| A few EU member-states already met their targets a few
| years ago, and are actually ahead of schedule.
|
| https://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/07/22/six-eu-
| countrie...
|
| Every challenge might be different, but there are indeed
| countries not only walking the walk but doing so at a
| fast pace.
| orwin wrote:
| yeah, if we don't have blackouts this year i'll be
| pleasently surprised. As this "plans" roll out w/o
| nuclear, we will become more dependant on gas from
| Russia. And as the blackouts roll out, we will have a
| portion of the electorate that will vote to get back to
| fossil fuels.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _yeah, if we don 't have blackouts this year i'll be
| pleasently surprised._
|
| How does this address GP's statement that governments
| don't "walk the walk" ?
|
| Meanwhile, some member states, like Portugal, already
| managed to get a few days of the year being 100% self-
| sufficiency from renewables.
|
| https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/portugal-
| breaks...
|
| What exactly leads you to believe that blackouts are
| possible or expected?
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of
| greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| As we increasingly seek to electrify everything, that number is
| sure to (slowly) inch up.
| midrus wrote:
| Well, it's not ideal but what is the alternative? To me it is
| either nuclear or watch how the next generations are going to
| be the last ones, because there is no other solution (or
| improvement at least) at sight right now.
| envengineer wrote:
| And to add: there is another huge negative to nuclear. The
| hidden and forgotten costs of uranium mining and waste are
| almost always glossed over and forgotten. The only solution for
| secure disposal of mines, and mining waste, is flooding. So now
| you have massive (50-5000 acres) ponds or lakes, to manage in
| perpetuity. We often hear of regular mining tailings ponds
| failing. Now imagine acidic, toxic and radioactive, water and
| sludge flooding down stream. Example:
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-min...
| tuatoru wrote:
| > massive (50-5000 acres) ponds or lakes
|
| Pretty sure you meant to write "tiny" there. Compare the
| numbers with copper mining. Going to ban copper?
| agumonkey wrote:
| what cultural change would help reduce the 75 remaining
| percents ?
|
| a few ideas I've seen:
|
| - leaner diet => less energy / land used to breed beef etc
|
| - more walking / bike / clean transport
|
| what else ?
| loeg wrote:
| It's just electrifying processes that use fuel today.
| Electric cars. Electric heating. Etc. That means we need more
| generation than we have today, especially in poor countries.
| fredophile wrote:
| I think the concern about long term storage is somewhat
| overemphasized. In theory it should be possible to choose a
| fairly remote, geologically stable area and make it the storage
| site. The problems are more political than technical.
|
| If it turns out that finding such a site isn't possible why
| don't we just grind the waste into a very fine powder and
| disperse it into the atmosphere? Coal ash is radioactive too
| and that's what we do with it. That was originally meant to be
| tongue in cheek but now I'm legitimately curious about how big
| an area you'd need to disperse a nuclear reactor's waste to get
| radiation levels no higher than you'd see from waste from a
| coal plant.
| gumby wrote:
| > The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl
| Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years
| after the fact...
|
| The fossil fuel _inclusion_ zone is 197 million square miles.
|
| Many of the current problems of nuclear come from its small
| volume (small unit count). Of course, as with fossil fuels,
| many new problems will emerge if volume comes up (waste storage
| is already an unsolved problem). But they may be resolvable if
| there is determination and incentive to do so,
| headmelted wrote:
| I don't think this is being fully fair to the EV case.
|
| You're implying that the externalities of getting electricity
| to power a car (i.e. fossil fuel burning) would be a barrier
| but the thread is explicitly about having that electricity come
| from nuclear generation.
|
| In terms of storage, I'm actually significantly _less_ worried
| about this and would go as far to suggest it won't even be an
| issue once we have EV's at scale. V2G exists now for current
| EVs and essentially converts every car into a large battery for
| grid storage.
| [deleted]
| umvi wrote:
| We don't have a long term storage plan for coal/gas plant waste
| either (apparently).
| chromatin wrote:
| On its face this sounds so trite, but after initially
| scrolling past I did a double take and thought deeply about
| it. Kudos.
| midrus wrote:
| To me right now it is the uncertainty of all the things that
| maybe could go wrong with nuclear power vs the certainty of a
| global collapse.
| Accujack wrote:
| Like what? And have you researched new generation reactor
| designs, like molten salt reactors? They address most of the
| problems with existing reactors, which are for the most part
| 50 year old technology.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It is always easy to say that unbuilt designs lack
| problems.
|
| What we can be certain of is that, by the time construction
| of such a plant is completed, wind+solar+storage will be
| overwhelmingly cheaper. Building out solar is right now the
| best use of every climate-disaster prevention dollar. In
| the near future, storage will compete, as iron-air
| batteries come online, and long-distance transmission. Each
| dollar spent elsewhere, whether on building or patching
| nuke plants, or patching or fueling coal plants, brings
| climate disaster nearer.
| Accujack wrote:
| I'm not saying the designs lack problems. Rather, I'm
| saying that they have addressed the problems you're
| talking about and are potentially considerably safer than
| old reactor tech.
|
| >In the near future, storage will compete, as iron-air
| batteries come online, and long-distance transmission.
|
| and if this doesn't happen? You're willing to risk our
| survival?
|
| >Each dollar spent elsewhere, whether on building or
| patching nuke plants, or patching or fueling coal plants,
| brings climate disaster nearer.
|
| You're equating coal plants with nuclear? Wow, you have
| quite a cognitive bias there. Nuclear plants have 0
| carbon emissions, they don't contribute to global warming
| once constructed, and construction doesn't generate
| enough carbon to nullify that advantage.
|
| Renewables can't meet our needs unless new technologies
| are developed. Nuclear CAN in its present state, and can
| do so even better if technological progress is made. Both
| must be pursued.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There are numerous viable storage technologies, just
| competing for which will be cheapest. Until that is
| settled _and_ the variable share reaches a practical
| limit, the money is better spent on panels.
|
| Iron-air battery tech is proven. Now it just needs
| industrial-scale build-out, which takes time: the
| factories need to be built before the battery farms.
|
| Renewables can, in fact, meet our needs with already
| mature technology. All that is uncertain is which choices
| will turn out cheapest. If it were not those batteries,
| it would be others, or underground compressed air, or
| molten salt, or liquified air.
| zamalek wrote:
| > 1, 2
|
| What about the long-term solution for the storage and disposal
| of combustion by-products? Do we just keep dumping them into
| the atmosphere?
|
| This argument against nuclear waste is an emotional one: the
| fact that we can see, store, and move nuclear by-products is an
| advantage. We completely lose control of combustion by-products
| that we dump into the atmosphere; they are simply perceived as
| less dangerous to our monkey brains.
|
| > 3
|
| The failure mode of coal power plants is continuous, and the
| damage caused by the sum of all fission disasters is nothing
| compared to the damage caused (including radioactive) by
| burning coal under normal circumstances, each year.
|
| There is obviously no contest compared to wind/solar.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Chernobyl was the literal worst case scenario, the thing
| exploded. I'm big on nuclear but I also worry when humans are
| involved. There is a town near mine where the groundwater is
| polluted from a chemical company a long time ago. I've often
| wondered how long until all ground water everywhere is ruined
| given enough time. Then I think of nuclear power and it scares
| me.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Nuclear is dangerous, just like flying is dangerous. Yet we
| can manage that danger so well that flying is literally the
| safest form of transport around, thanks to a culture of
| safety, strong oversight and regulation.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Chernobyl incident would be way more worst if those 3 people
| whose name I can't remember had not sacrificed their life.
| Those 3 people died within a week and if they were not there
| I guess Europe would probably be suffering for millenniums.
|
| https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-
| million...
| revax wrote:
| Meh, there is a lot of folklore about Chernobyl. Here's an
| interview with one of the men your article claims died.
|
| https://www.exutopia.com/chernobyl-interview-alexei-
| ananenko...
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| The article explicitly tells that he did not die.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| > I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain,
| inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
|
| I think this is a big point. This would be expensive and there
| will be a temptation for politicians to underfund the
| operations and give the difference back as tax cuts.
| NotChina wrote:
| For 35 years the green movement told us to use Fossil Fuels, and
| forced a moratorium on new nuclear plants. Fast forward to now
| and ponder how they thought they were right all along.
| selimnairb wrote:
| I think we are past the point of being so picky that we think we
| can afford to ignore all non "perfect" solutions. We have to
| recognize that to engineer our way out of climate disaster we
| will have to employ solutions that create new problems (e.g.,
| nuclear waste) that we will have to solve in the future. As long
| as these problems can be solved later (which to an extent is true
| with nuclear waste), then we must proceed.
| Beldin wrote:
| Significantly reducing population (to, say, 3 billion or less) is
| probably our best bet against climate change. However, to do so
| in any remotely ethical way takes a lot of time.
|
| The next step is energy use: both reduction of consumption and
| reduction of wasted energy, ie. less energy, more effectively
| used. Things like insulation fall under this category.
|
| Because we're simply using too many resources for the world to
| remain unchanged in the medium term. We need to change.
|
| Changing the energy mix without addressing this just postpones
| the consequences of our actions - and not even that much.
|
| Basically: massive, world-wide societal changes are our best bet
| against climate change. Nuclear energy is our best bet to push
| the hot potato to (at best) the next generation.
| csisnett wrote:
| Funny how people who think the earth overpopulated always think
| is other people who are overpopulating it, and not themselves.
|
| Wealth can be created. There's no limit to how much wealth can
| be created. Focusing on deleting the population is immoral.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Ask the pro-depopulation who should not be allowed to have X+
| children. I not those people, how many they maybe, pollute
| less all together than those blaming population growth.
|
| The issue is not with the population but the few who ruin
| everything for everyone.
| rahen wrote:
| Nobody asked to delete population. The challenge is to allow
| people to access familial planning, make contraception and
| abortions more widespread in developing countries, and stop
| or at least reduce pro-natal fiscal policies in the West.
|
| Besides, morality is highly subjective.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > Funny how people who think the earth overpopulated always
| think is other people who are overpopulating it, and not
| themselves.
|
| I would assume that most of these kinds of folks would be
| childless?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Wealth can be created. There's no limit to how much wealth
| can be created.
|
| Traditionally wealth means _stuff_ or ability to acquire
| _stuff_ , which inherently consumes resources. I'm assuming
| you are referring to a reinterpretation of the term "wealth"
| to mean "a number in a computer system"?
| csisnett wrote:
| Wealth is things that people value. Wealth creation is
| finished when individuals freely, and willingly exchange
| what they currently have (money) for valuables and continue
| to do that happily.
|
| That can be software so yes, given that software can be
| created without limits and that software wealth creation is
| a subset of total wealth creation that alone is proof that
| wealth creation is unlimited.
|
| However if you think material resources is the limiting
| factor then you're going to have to explain exactly what is
| going to stop scientists from developing new materials that
| can be used in new products or in existing products.
| tzamora wrote:
| Why is inmoral? It's just population orderly control, and it
| will at some point just get constant so wealth will be
| limited to that constant and it will not grow anymore,
| economy doesn't need to grow to improve human welfare.
|
| It's completely sane to think and discuss how we can in
| someway "delete" population.
| csisnett wrote:
| What is that constant that you talk about?
|
| It is immoral to think the world would be better with fewer
| people because what you're really saying is, 3 Billion
| people or whatever number shouldn't exist. If you think not
| existing is a good thing then we wouldn't be having this
| conversation would we?
| rahen wrote:
| I agree we should help curb down our fertility rate worldwide.
| However this would take at least 50 years before it starts
| showing effect. It's too long a time when facing an
| environmental emergency.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Fertility rate is already decreasing fast, worldwide. The
| environment problem today is due to the carbon footprint of
| the rich, not of the majority.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Well, the aspiration is for most countries citizens' to
| have the same amenities as the rich.
|
| Who are we to tell developing countries they can't have a
| TV, computer, phone, lights, washer/dryer, refrigerator,
| and HVAC in every home?
| rahen wrote:
| Not in Africa though, which will probably multiply its
| population by 4 to 1Ghab by the end of the century.
|
| Also their environmental footprint will multiply by a lot
| more than 4.
| holoduke wrote:
| People who claim the world is overpopulated probably live in a
| big city and never really travelled the world. Because there
| are vast remote places thousands of miles across without anyone
| living. I believe the world can easily hold 100 billion people
| without issues. And besides, downscaling the world is not an
| option. Every organic structure needs to expand indefinitely.
| The only reason you would have decrease in population is world
| scale war. Sure we don't need that.
| demosito666 wrote:
| Currently 60% of landmass is being used by humans directly
| (human habitat, pastures, crops). Of remaining 40% about a
| half is still being continuously influenced by humans
| (residential forests, patches of land between roads, etc.).
| And the land is being used unsustainably and almost all
| unused land is beyond the polar circle. So no, the Earth can
| not hold 100B people with current level of consumption.
|
| And generally you don't want current consumption level, you
| want much higher standards, because majority of world's
| population is living in poverty. Which means that Earth can't
| hold 8B people either unless humans improve their land use
| efficiency significantly, which is unlikely.
|
| [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/9/5/129
| rsj_hn wrote:
| You know, it's possible to convert ground dedicated to
| cattle or agriculture and develop that into cities. That's
| historically how we always do it. It's not like housing
| developments can only happen on land that no one owns and
| that isn't being used for anything at all.
|
| What we do is change what the land is used for. So I don't
| think this argument holds any water, TBH.
|
| By the time the frontier was closed -- say late 1800s,
| pretty much all US land was owned by someone and ostensibly
| dedicated to some use. Yet we managed to increase our
| population quite a bit since then.
|
| All European land was spoken for by the early middle ages.
| Yet they managed to grow their population too.
| holoduke wrote:
| No way 60% is used by people. Can you provide some sources
| on this.
| rahen wrote:
| Not really, not all land can be used to host people. We need
| space to grow food, produce energy, have factories and
| offices, infrastructures... We're already using more than
| what the entire emerged land can provide us each year (with
| the help of massive supplies of fossil fuel and derived
| products, which will eventually run out).
|
| If we want to offer everyone a western lifestyle while being
| sustainable on the long run, the optimal world population is
| indeed estimated at around 1.5-2 billions (world population
| of 1950), and definitely under 3 billions.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-
| po...
|
| Or just Google "Optimal world population".
| mynameishere wrote:
| That is obviously the only answer (unless cold fusion comes out
| soon) but it's also the only answer that can't make anyone
| money. (Except maybe Pfizer, if the tinhat crowd is right.)
| mem0r1 wrote:
| Yes, it is.
| [deleted]
| carapace wrote:
| It's a bit cheeky but I like to point out that _the Sun is
| nuclear power_. It 's a maintenance-free fusion reactor so
| powerful that it can blind you from 150 million km away.
|
| - - - -
|
| Anyway, Robert Bussard believed that he was on to something with
| his polywell fusion plant:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU
|
| He claimed that it would only take about $200M of engineering
| development to become viable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
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