[HN Gopher] Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
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Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
Author : mutant_glofish
Score : 211 points
Date : 2023-07-16 08:13 UTC (14 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (scanalyst.fourmilab.ch)
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected
| energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes
| from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation,
| heating, industrial usage, transport, etc.
|
| Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat,
| friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are
| coal, gas, and oil.
|
| Important to note that the image is for 2018. So, things have
| shifted a bit in favor of wind and solar since then. There's an
| updated chart for this:
| https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/E...
|
| A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph:
|
| - Wind and solar grew a lot.
|
| - Nuclear declined.
|
| - Gas grew a little.
|
| - Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up.
|
| - Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down,
| rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil
| and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable
| energy.
|
| - fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that
| is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive
| difference as we'll be able to do more with less.
|
| - Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason
| for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended
| output rather than wasted.
|
| - Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part
| of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a
| lot in just 3 years.
|
| - We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them
| with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the
| envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not
| the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with
| something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less.
|
| Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the
| energy market at a glance.
|
| Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that
| decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason.
| Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too
| expensive.
| HPsquared wrote:
| That chart overemphasizes waste heat. 1 MJ of heat at 50degC is
| a lot less valuable than 1 MJ of electricity. They are not
| interchangable. The 1 MJ of electricity could pump much more
| than 1 MJ of low-grade heat, and it would take a lot of low-
| grade heat to generate 1 MJ of electrical energy.
|
| The parameter of interest is exergy. That is, usable energy.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergy
| baybal2 wrote:
| And important note that relatively modern coal and gas
| powerplants are more thermally efficient than nuclear.
|
| Nuclear is ran in between 250C-350C, which is rather
| inefficient, and requires very big turbines.
| [deleted]
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Isn't that a safety thing? To shutdown a natural gas plant
| you just close some valves feeding the facility, or at
| worse introduce something into the combustion path that
| halts combustion. Nuclear fission obviously can be
| moderated, but not in such a sharp and safe manner.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It can be, but the thermal cycling ages the very
| expensive equipment so it doesn't tend to be worth it.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I think you're confusing a few concepts here.
|
| Thermal-spectrum (slow neutron) nuclear reactors are much
| easier to control than fast reactors because they have
| much slower reaction times. But this isn't particularly
| relevant because thermal-spectrum supercritical water
| reactors are possible; supercritical water reactor
| doesn't implies fast reactor. Let's put fast reactors
| aside.
|
| In thermal-spectrum reactors, the moderator is _not_ in
| itself a safety feature. The moderator is necessary to
| slow the neutrons down into the thermal-spectrum.
| Thermal-spectrum neutrons are far more likely to be
| absorbed by the fuel than fast neutrons, so if you lose
| the moderator the reaction stops (and decay heat
| continues...) Fast reactors don 't use a moderator and
| don't need one because they use a higher grade of fuel
| which can sustain a chain reaction with fast neutrons,
| not needing thermal neutrons.
|
| In some thermal-spectrum reactors (particularly BWRs and
| PWRs), the moderator plays double duty as a coolant. In
| these reactors the moderator is a safety feature insofar
| as it's the coolant, not because it's a moderator. In
| other kinds of thermal-spectrum reactors, the coolant and
| moderator may be different; for instance RBMKs use
| graphite as the moderator and water as the coolant.
| Modern CANDU reactors use heavy water as a moderator
| (which is less efficient as a moderator, but captures
| fewer neutrons and therefore allows for a lower grade of
| fuel), but this moderator is unpressurized in the
| calandria and remains cool; the water in the coolant loop
| is hot, pressurized, and doesn't provide sufficient
| moderation to keep the reaction going. If you drained the
| moderator but kept the coolant loop running, the reactor
| would stop. If you kept the moderator but drained the
| coolant loop, it would eventually melt down (probably
| after the water in the calandria boils off). The coolant
| is what removes heat from the reactor and the moderator
| is what slows the neutrons so they're _more_ likely to
| cause fission.
|
| tl;dr: The moderator _increases_ reactivity. Coolant
| removes heat.
|
| In principle you could make a thermal-spectrum
| supercritical water reactor using any of these, but the
| research is aimed towards making a supercritical reactor
| with the PWR or CANDU designs. The reason supercritical
| water reactors aren't used yet is because metallurgy
| isn't up to the task. Supercritical water is already used
| in traditional power plants, but those don't have to deal
| with neutron radiation which structurally degrades
| anything it runs into (some alloys/materials more than
| others.) Finding alloys which can hold up to both
| supercritical water and neutron radiation is the major
| hurdle to clear.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I think what I was trying to convey was you can always
| undergo the scram action on a nuclear reactor to halt it.
| The problem with this is in some cases, this mean
| restarting the reactor costs more than the value of the
| electricity it will generate before refueling.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Well, you could scram a supercritical water reactor too.
| If there's an emergency that warrants scramming the
| reactor, the time it will need to restart should be low
| on your list of priorities.
|
| As for refueling, in some designs like CANDU refueling
| can be done 'online', refueling one tube while the others
| are running.
| SigmundA wrote:
| Nuclear does not emit carbon when used, the waste heat
| means very little, emissions are what matters when
| discussing efficiency.
|
| Plutonium 239 is also 83,610,000 MJ/kg vs coal at 35 MJ/kg
| so the difference in thermal efficiency is nearly
| meaningless given how much specific energy density
| advantage nuclear has.
| ben_w wrote:
| The energy mass density is hugely relevant for
| spacecraft, not that important for most power stations.
|
| (Although an old piece of anti-nuclear rhetoric that
| annoys me was asking if you'd prefer a bucket of coal or
| bucket of nuclear waste under your bed, and one half of
| my annoyance was indeed the relative energy densities...)
| HPsquared wrote:
| That's why nuclear power has so much potential. We throw
| away >99% of it, we're barely scratching the surface.
| melling wrote:
| "Coal declined a lot"
|
| Yes, in the United States (4% of global population), coal usage
| declined.
|
| Unfortunately, globally coal usage is at all time highs.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-cons...
|
| I'd say it's ok that we overlooked that but we were warned 45
| years ago about global coal usage being a large part of the
| problem.
|
| https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
| bscphil wrote:
| > Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And
| that decline is cost driven.
|
| This does not appear to be correct. The 2018 chart shows a
| total energy generation of 101.2 quads. The 2021 chart shows
| only 97.3 quads, a reduction.
|
| The nuclear fraction of total energy generation in 2018 was
| 0.0834; in 2021 this became 0.0836, a slight increase in its
| proportion of US energy generation!
|
| Moreover, it's astonishing that in 2021 the US while operating
| only 55 nuclear power plants generated more energy with those
| plants than all the energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric, and
| geothermal _combined_. Given the sheer number of solar and wind
| farms I see almost everywhere I go these days, it 's really not
| great that they generate such a small portion of our energy
| needs.
|
| My understanding is that this situation will just get worse as
| we try to scale up wind and solar, as well, since it's much
| more difficult to supply base load with unpredictable power
| sources.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Another aspect is the power it costs to make the power. Oil is
| a huge industry with enormous transport fuel usage. Nowadays
| about a 6th of the energy goes into collection. The more we
| electrify the more that will be saved too coming off the total
| power we need. Solar, Wind, Hydro and Nuclear are all vastly
| better in this aspect on production costs and little ongoing
| transport.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Good point. Oil tankers by themselves put out a measurable
| percentage of CO2. Also oil refining is an energy intensive
| industry. Ironically, a lot of that has been cleaned up. It's
| literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and
| solar than it is for them to burn their own product. That's
| why Texas has so much renewable power.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using
| wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own
| product.
|
| Until it's winter, the ground is frozen, and they have no
| reserves to burn. Then there's a panic to get the same
| nonrenewables they would normally flare off when the
| weather is sunny and breezy.
|
| > That's why Texas has so much renewable power.
|
| It has tons of underdeveloped land in a region with good
| wind and favorable sunlight. That's it.
|
| Texas, like Germany's lignite (shit coal) renaissance, is a
| terrible example of good energy policy. Keep in mind Texas
| is also on its own grid and struggles to pay people to burn
| the excess energy they can't use since they also can't
| easily send it outside their grid and have almost no means
| to store the excess.
| danhor wrote:
| Wasn't the issue with Texas that renewables were behaving
| as expected (unfortunately not producing a lot of
| electricity), but fossil fuel power sources were failing
| unexpectedly due to the freezes? Thus the issue not being
| renwables.
|
| I'm also surprised at the mention of a coal renaissance
| in germany. While coal isn't reduced as much as it
| should, all the data I found pointed to a continual
| downwards trend over the last years.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > Thus the issue not being renwables.
|
| I never said renewables were a problem in Texas, I said
| the general energy policy is stupid.
|
| >While coal isn't reduced as much as it should, all the
| data I found pointed to a continual downwards trend over
| the last years.
|
| Until Ukraine war banned them buying coal and gas from
| Russia, now they need to produce it domestically.
| https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-energy-u-turn-coal-
| instead-of... and
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-
| crisis-fu...
| zokier wrote:
| > The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights
| rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected
| energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of
| electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport,
| etc.
|
| > Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat,
| friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses
| are coal, gas, and oil.
|
| To uninitiated like me the chart was really confusing. In many
| sectors doesn't almost all energy get ultimately lost in some
| way? Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat,
| or in transportation unless you move goods up a mountain all
| the energy is just lost?
| Trombone12 wrote:
| > Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat
|
| I mean, not _all_ of the IT sector is ad-tech you know; for
| example, many would argue that the systems durably recording
| how much money you own provide a useful service.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| "Lost" means spent towards nobody's useful purpose. Nobody
| used the output in any way. In transportation, you used your
| car to get from point A to point B. You don't care about the
| heat or noise or whatever that you generated. That energy was
| "lost." If somebody harvested that same energy directly from
| your vehicle for some purpose, like making fried eggs on your
| engine block, then the portion used to fry your egg would no
| longer be "lost"
| zokier wrote:
| That just seems either an impossible, or just useless
| measurement. I guess for industries like aluminum smelting
| you can say the product captures significant part of the
| energy put into the process, but most human activities are
| not like that. For example machining/casting that raw
| aluminum stock into some intricate product, all the energy
| ends up as waste because from physics point of view that
| intricate object doesn't contain any more energy than the
| raw stock material. If that is how its considered, then I
| struggle to understand how the rejected energy is not
| closer to 100%
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| It's not about energy capture. It's about energy being
| used to accomplish useful work vs energy expelled towards
| non-productive ends. And I fail to see how this is a
| useless measurement of energy consumption when it's the
| entire reason we harness energy beyond what we can
| consume by eating.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| In your example of machining the useful energy consumed
| was in the kinetic energy transferred by the motor into
| the bit. The noise and heat and other forms of energy
| dissipation that didn't go _directly_ into machining the
| object were wasted or lost. If your goal is the machined
| part, any energy that wasn't directly necessary or if
| it's expenditure were zero and the part would have been
| machined identically, is considered a waste or lost
| energy. The "lost" doesn't mean the rest of the energy
| were somehow captured or retained, but that it was
| captured productively towards some goal. Perhaps the term
| is confusing or misleading, but that's what it's intended
| meaning is.
| p1mrx wrote:
| > the useful energy consumed was in the kinetic energy
| transferred by the motor into the bit.
|
| This doesn't solve the problem, because the final
| machined part is not moving, and thus has no kinetic
| energy.
|
| In order to get an efficiency number, we would have to
| know what 100% means. Maybe it's possible to calculate
| the minimum energy required to break the chemical bonds
| spanning a given cross sectional area of solid aluminum?
|
| I imagine that you could (very theoretically) recover
| this energy by cold welding the aluminum back together a
| vacuum.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Right but it's not a maximizing theoretical loss
| function, it's picking a specific expenditure of energy
| as the goal - kinetic energy of the bit. Particularly you
| don't know the goal of the bits motion, and the work the
| energy does could translate into the machined parts final
| configuration or something else. The goal isn't specially
| to account for energy in some full final system but to
| give an optimization function for the tool itself to
| maximize. You're looking at it from a physics point of
| view rather than an engineering point of view, the
| engineering view is practical - how much energy is
| expended to get a certain amount of work done by the bit
| and not doing other stuff like heating the environment,
| making noises, inducing vibration. The metric is a
| practical one, and it's never meant to capture the entire
| energy transfer dynamic in a physics sense.
| ianburrell wrote:
| The important question is how much energy do they need to
| put in to get the result. The goal can be machined
| aluminum or car at destination. For lots of processes,
| the output energy, like moving car or shining light, is
| important and the goal. Higher efficiency means can put
| in less energy and get the same result.
|
| Light ends up as heat, but LEDs are more efficient cause
| they don't produce extra heat. Electric motors are more
| efficient than combustion ones so electric cars end up
| going farther for same input.
| zokier wrote:
| Sure, it is reasoably easy to say that A is more
| efficient than B, and even quantify how much energy A
| saves in comparison to B. But that is only a relative
| measure; it is far less obvious how you'd quantify the
| waste in absolute terms like the chart in question here
| seems to do? To do so you'd need to know some theoretical
| ideal minimum energy process that would get some
| equivalent end result as a reference point, but that
| seems wildly infeasible to estimate
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The text line under it tries to explain the concept, but
| fails due to brevity. I believe (by looking at the numbers
| there) it counts as "loses" everything that happens due to
| energy conversion, and "useful work" everything that happens
| with the final form of the energy. If that's the case,
| friction inside an internal combustion engine counts as
| loses, but at the wheels of a car counts as useful work.
| _n_b_ wrote:
| > Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline.
|
| In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively
| stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been
| compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are
| coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are
| coming, and the Palisades unit may restart... so I think you'll
| see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical
| to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will
| try to get a further life extension to 80 years.
|
| Worldwide, we're in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in
| Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally
| shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back
| online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.)
|
| This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or
| advanced reactors---some of those will certainly get built too.
|
| [1] https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-
| generati...
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Well according to the two graphgs for 2018 and 2019, nuclear
| declined a bit in the US. Not surprising because there were
| some plant closures and not a whole lot of plant openings.
| And nothing is on track to be added any time soon. Maybe one
| or two plants.
|
| New nuclear is a bit like an oil tanker (pun intended,
| sorry): just very slow to ramp up new capacity. This boom you
| are talking about is so far not adding up to a lot of
| capacity being delivered. We're talking a few gw here and
| there. Solar and wind are being deployed by the tens of gw
| per year. Same with battery.
|
| I believe we'll see some nuclear plants being approved for
| the next decade. And maybe these modular reactors start
| delivering on their promises. I still think they are
| expensive. But why not? Unless something happens on the cost
| front, that will remain a minority of useful output.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| The pressure on the NRC to lighten up a bit is immense. I
| suspect we might see some significant acceleration,
| especially with the various electrification drives, coupled
| with the multitude of safe nuclear designs, and a general
| sense that "why is this so broken?" permeating everywhere
| that cares.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Congress is free to change the law that NRC must operate
| under. Until that happens, the NRC cannot "lighten up"
| (if they did so in violation of law, they'd be taken to
| court.)
| coryrc wrote:
| Solar capacity factor is typically between 10-25%, so "tens
| of GWs" doesn't go nearly as far.
| tomrod wrote:
| That's great news!
| Andrex wrote:
| I suppose we're going to see the nuclear debate play out as
| an A/B test with the US vs. the countries mentioned. Should
| be some interesting data eventually.
| Krasnol wrote:
| > Worldwide, we're in a nuclear boom
|
| This is not what a boom looks like: https://world-
| nuclear.org/getmedia/18acef23-4f61-4e14-b66e-7...
|
| and it won't be better if you have a closer look. Take
| Europe, for example. Nuclear plants over budget and overdue
| (France, UK), projects which are highly unlikely to be ever
| build (Poland), a rotting nuclear fleet (France) and a final
| exit in Germany.
|
| Then there are all those plants in poor countries which
| depend on Russia.
|
| And then there is China with their magically fast build
| reactors but also with massive coal and renewable
| construction.
|
| Nuclear peaked years ago, and it's going to be a decline in
| the future since it is money in the end deciding the fate and
| nuclear isn't worth it.
| vmladenov wrote:
| > We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace
| them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of
| the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and
| not the output.
|
| This was Tesla's main claim at their recent energy
| presentation. Page 4 of the doc[1] shows our waste heat to
| useful work is roughly 2 to 1
|
| [1] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-
| Part-3.pdf
| polotics wrote:
| This chart distresses me: solar at 0.9 is only about a third of
| petroleum at 36. It is making it look like new renewable (ie
| non-hyrdo) are a lot more sizeable than they really are. From
| Lawrence Livermore this is hard to swallow. If the boxes sizes
| are on a weird logarithmic scale, then this should be explicit
| in the legend.
| aurelwu wrote:
| the lines are what shows the energy amount, the boxes have a
| minimal size for readability and are acting as the legend of
| the chart.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| That's the 2018 one by 2021, it hit 1.5. And you forget this
| is the entire US energy economy; not just electricity.
|
| Also, only about a third of that petroleum input is useful
| (worse in transport, about a quarter). So, that would be
| about a 12. Add wind, hydro, and nuclear to the mix and it's
| basically a 50-50 split in terms of useful output of oil vs.
| renewables. Of course most of that goes into electricity
| generation. But luckily there's a major transition from ice
| to evs under way. So, that will eat into petroleum usage
| quickly.
|
| If you look at the useful energy component, the transition to
| renewables is a lot further than many people think. Everybody
| keeps comparing the raw produced energy. The only thing that
| matters is the useful part of that.
| bostonwalker wrote:
| You are eagerly reading an agenda into what is probably just
| an artifact of the plotting software intended to make the
| plot easier to read. Hanlon's razor applies here.
| api wrote:
| "Inexhaustible" means at any reasonable human / terrestrial scale
| of course. Humans use a very tiny amount of energy in cosmic
| terms.
| Zigurd wrote:
| If you have money, you can make energy. Therefore you should
| spend your capex on the things that will get you the most power
| soonest. And that is what is happening:
| https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/ove...
|
| Nuclear is a niche category now. But nuclear technology is a
| fashionable investment that VC limiteds want in their portfolio.
| So you get articles like this that position uranium fission
| energy as "renewable."
| cyrillite wrote:
| This is brilliantly interesting. However, I lack a taxonomy for
| understanding nuclear power. What's outdated, what's just old,
| what's new and promising, what's just nonsense, and what are the
| ways we expect to deploy nuclear energy?
|
| Finding reliable and accessible sources is tricky. Does anybody
| here have a good starting point for a technically minded non-
| expert outsider?
| philipkglass wrote:
| The vast majority of new reactors built each year are still
| light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel. There's a
| smaller but notable fleet of power reactors of the pressurized
| heavy water type. Everything else is a rounding error.
|
| My newest nuclear engineering textbook is from 1983 [1] and
| it's still fine because in the last 40 years very little has
| changed at a high level. In online discussions you'll see a lot
| of excitement about other kinds of reactors (molten salt
| reactors, gas cooled, metal cooled, pebble bed, breeders, etc.)
| and this older textbook mentions all those kinds of reactors
| too. But if you want to understand what the nuclear industry
| actually builds and operates, a used textbook from the 1980s or
| later will be fine.
|
| [1] Introduction to Nuclear Engineering 2nd Edition by John
| LaMarsh.
| krupan wrote:
| Interesting (maybe?) background info, this is John Walker, the
| creator of AutoCAD, an o.g. software entrepreneur. Also the
| author of The Hacker's Diet: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Expensive though.
| JDEW wrote:
| You know what's expensive? Treating 100s of millions of people
| for pollution related illnesses.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Not to mention new hazard mitigation due to climate change
| bluescrn wrote:
| Nu-cu-lar is scary. And it's much cheaper to just tell the
| working class they can't heat/cool their homes any more, the
| little people have just got to stop using energy...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I mean they won't be able to afford nuclear...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Yep, no way that could ever backfire
| marsven_422 wrote:
| [dead]
| himinlomax wrote:
| Solar panels are cheaper. They're also useless at night or in
| winter at higher latitude.
|
| The question is not whether it's expensive, the question is
| whether it's worth the price.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Renewables != solar.
|
| Renewables = a mix of solar, wind, hydro, geo, and wave,
| backed up by storage and a more efficient grid, supplement by
| various local - down to household - generation options.
| Supported by smarter and larger grids.
|
| The absolute criminality of the last few decades means that
| renewable tech is decades behind where it could have been
| with a no-compromise crash development program starting in
| the 90s.
|
| The real problem with renewable has always been political.
| Renewables are inherently diverse and distributed. They're
| not limited to a very small number of critical supply chains
| and economic choke points. And some people are really unhappy
| about that.
| willis936 wrote:
| Renewables are popular with most demos. What's even more
| popular is low LCOE. The technical challenges of energy
| storage can be hand waved away, but not if you want to
| actually solve the problems.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >The technical challenges of <snip> storage can be hand
| waved away, but not if you want to actually solve the
| problems.
|
| Now it fits nuclear too.
| pfdietz wrote:
| We're close to, or even at, the point where hydrogen made
| with solar, then burned in combined cycle power plants,
| produces power more cheaply than nuclear. Of course, in a
| renewable energy system, only a fraction of the energy has to
| go through hydrogen; much will be consumed directly from the
| grid (or through short term storage.)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Not sure about that.
|
| On paper, it looks like it.
|
| On practice, my mother pays 30EUR a month of electricity in
| France, where nuclear energy is everywhere. She asked for a
| quote to get panels on her house, and they got back to her
| with 20000EUR.
|
| Sure you can move the needle by noting I drain way more power
| than her, than she heats her house using fossil fuel and that
| the quotes could be have been reduced in many ways.
|
| You can also note that solar panels have to be replaced
| several times, take much more space, don't have to including
| wiring in their ROI calculation (while nuclear does for some
| weird reason) and are created by electricity generated by
| fossil or nuclear fuel, so their building price is already
| cheap.
|
| I wouldn't say the answer is that clear cut.
| cinntaile wrote:
| What do you mean wiring isn't included? How is a quote not
| the total price, including labour and material costs?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I mean that in France, the reports assessing the cost of
| the energy produced by wind turbines and solar panels
| don't include the wiring from the source of energy to
| where the energy is distributed.
|
| Which is logical.
|
| For some reason I don't know, nuclear reactors cost
| evaluation must include the wiring.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Since you kept talking about solar panels it was very
| unclear that you were no longer talking about the quote
| your mom got.
| shakow wrote:
| And that's with the ARENH screwing the French people w.r.t.
| the actual production price of EDF (mostly) nuclear energy.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I would recommend reading the article. The paper they
| discussing projects .003 USD per kilowatt hour.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The minute someone builds one and has the receipts and waste
| disposal set up, I am all ears. Really.
|
| But every generation of nuclear plant has promised "power too
| cheap to meter". The last 3 generations all failed to deliver
| (and have been ruinously expensive). Gen 4 isn't expected to
| start commercial operations until 2035 I think?
|
| This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be
| assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with
| tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is
| never even close to reality.
|
| I am open to some of the SME concepts (mass manufacturing,
| large numbers of small units) because they seem to deal with
| at least some of the economic issues nuclear has.
|
| But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an
| economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as
| fusion is.
|
| I actually think that being small, simple, short term,
| politically unimportant with commodity parts is to other
| renewables (wind, solar etc) what reliability is for nuclear.
| eaasen wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article
| or post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead._"
|
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| effed3 wrote:
| [flagged]
| meghan_rain wrote:
| > operation of these facilities will require teams of people
| recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of
| "diversity", "equity", or "inclusion"
|
| Indeed a gem. Or do you want a nuclear power plant in your
| neighbourhood managed by people who happen to be the pet-
| minority-du-jour on Twitter?
| dang wrote:
| If you continue to post unsubstantive comments and/or take HN
| threads further into flamewar, we are going to have to ban
| you. Your account has been doing a ton of this, and that's
| seriously not ok. It's not what this site is for, and
| destroys what it is for.
|
| If you'd please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to
| the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
| uoaei wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Hellish flamewar is not ok on this site, regardless of how
| wrong other people are or you feel they are. Your comments
| stand out in this flamewar as being distinctly the most
| hellish. Not only that, you've broken the site guidelines
| so egregiously elsewhere (e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36744128) that I think
| we have to ban this account.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that
| you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| Edit: I changed my mind and unbanned you because your
| recent comments before these two threads don't look this
| egregious, although you've still been breaking the site
| guidelines and that's not ok. Please fix this going
| forward.
| uoaei wrote:
| I appreciate your eternal level-headedness and poise. I
| need checks as much as anyone. I won't disparage HN's
| community; I have become sour to the image of tech-
| oriented rationalists vs the reality and am projecting
| expectations onto Toms, Dicks, and Nancys. My weight to
| bear of course.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Harvard and UNC just lost a civil rights lawsuit because
| they were openly racist to Asian applicants.
|
| They guised that organized hate as "diversity, inclusion,
| and equity".
| uoaei wrote:
| [flagged]
| rayiner wrote:
| > Demonstrate for the class what you think that has to do
| with operating nuclear power plants.
|
| Ask that to the people at Harvard discriminating against
| Asians wanting to study, among other things, nuclear
| engineering.
| uoaei wrote:
| [flagged]
| meghan_rain wrote:
| [flagged]
| meghan_rain wrote:
| [flagged]
| uoaei wrote:
| [flagged]
| meghan_rain wrote:
| [flagged]
| uoaei wrote:
| [flagged]
| ttfkam wrote:
| They ended up hiring 25-30yo white males. It wasn't about
| color. They just didn't want to pay full wages and didn't
| want to be told a hard "no" because of obvious safety
| problems.
| brazzy wrote:
| [flagged]
| rayiner wrote:
| [flagged]
| brazzy wrote:
| [flagged]
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| The space to keep exhausted fission fuel is not.
| ars wrote:
| One of the great parts of using a breeder reactor is it burns
| up all the harmful fuel. What's left decays very quickly, so
| there just isn't much to store.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's quite a lot less space than you think. There's a giant
| dump outside Denver international airport that is orders of
| magnitude larger than we'd need. There are of course other
| factors, but space is not one of them.
| codethief wrote:
| > Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are
| today from the dawn of civilization--more than 10,000 years ago.
|
| Thermodynamics would like to have a word:
|
| > [...] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to
| space, and that's via (infrared) radiation. We understand the
| phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface
| temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the
| human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate
| (conveniently chosen to represent a 10x increase every century),
| we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years.
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
| epaulson wrote:
| Yes, we could get a lot more energy out of our fission fuel. The
| reason the USA doesn't is because Jimmy Carter set a policy of
| not reprocessing fuel because he felt it encouraged nuclear
| weapons proliferation, coming just a few years after India
| exploded its first device. Carter's statement:
| https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf
| pfdietz wrote:
| This is a common nuke bro story, but it's nonsense. The actual
| reason is that plutonium has negative value. It costs more to
| incorporate it in new fuel rods than it would cost to make fuel
| rods with freshly enriched uranium.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Considering that Reagan reversed this policy by unbanning
| reprocessing in 1981, this isn't the only reason we don't do it
| today. Other reasons include that reprocessing is expensive and
| that we found a lot more uranium ore than originally expected.
|
| https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf
| sbierwagen wrote:
| The Indian test used weapons-grade plutonium produced in the
| low power CIRUS research reactor, much like how we were
| making plutonium in 1945. It's thought that Carter banned
| civilian reprocessing because a nuclear test in 1962 showed
| that a weapon could even be made from what the DOE described
| as "reactor-grade" plutonium: https://permanent.access.gpo.go
| v/websites/osti.gov/www.osti.... https://npolicy.org/greg-
| jones-americas-1962-reactor-grade-p...
|
| A bomb with an actively cooled pit probably couldn't be
| miniaturized enough to be MIRVed but it would be compatible
| with old school single-warhead ICBMs or air delivery.
| bullen wrote:
| Maybe, but the heat added to earth has to be radiated away from
| earth.
|
| We have never added energy from matter at this scale before.
|
| Same for fusion.
| zokier wrote:
| The total energy consumption of humanity is still very tiny
| compared to the total solar irradiation that earth receives.
| Maybe at some point that might become a concern, but not
| anytime soon.
| goodpoint wrote:
| THIS! People seem to forget basic physics sometimes.
|
| Any source of free, unlimited "clean" energy would be an
| environmental catastrophe because energy used is released into
| the atmosphere as heat.
|
| We need sources that *capture* energy already in the
| environment, like solar, wind and similar.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Silent downvotes do very little.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| See other replies above. Thermal energy emissions pale in
| utter insignificance compared to the solar heat flux. What
| matters is things that control what happens with that solar
| heat flux, aka greenhouse gasses.
| Vecr wrote:
| If that was actually a problem you could use geoengineering
| to make the planet more reflective overall, letting you use
| more nuclear power.
| refurb wrote:
| Global energy production in 2019: 617 x 10^18 J
|
| Global energy from the sun _per day_ : 430 x 10^18 J
| abecedarius wrote:
| Curious: for the latter I get 7e21 J, using Wikipedia's
| normal-insolation figure of 947 W and its Earth albedo of
| 0.3. That's an order of magnitude greater. I'm probably
| missing something, do you have a source?
|
| (Of course my figure would only increase the difference
| you're pointing out.)
| goodpoint wrote:
| This does not take into account that the planet was in
| balance before human activities has started impacting it.
| Plus earth reflectivity is decreasing due to human
| intervention e.g. deforestation.
| rainworld wrote:
| Indeed we are 2-3 orders of magnitude away from the point
| where our energy output itself non-negligibly, globally heats
| the earth. And if we kept growing, an incandescent Earth
| would not be too far off. There are hard limits.
| defrost wrote:
| You really should look up the _daily_ energy reaching the earth
| 's surface from sunlight and compare that to _annual_ total
| energy use by humans.
|
| The vast majority of daily solar energy is radiated away
| already and it dwarfs human energy consumption.
|
| Climate change is a result of human activity adding more
| _insulation_ (via C02, methane, increased water vapor) to the
| atmosphere and trapping more of the energy from the sun that
| would previously have radiated away.
|
| The increasing global average tempreture is caused by humans
| adding more blankets .. not by humans adding more heat under
| the existing blankets.
| a3w wrote:
| AFAICT, you are probably wrong. Here is some points as to
| why:
|
| > daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight
|
| ... which is exactly the same as the amount of energy
| radiating off, in a state of equilibrium. But here comes the
| problem, if we add heat, e.g. from fission, we are not in an
| equilibrium anymore, are we?
|
| Skeptics of anthropogenic climate change make that claim all
| the time: Absolute numbers are huge, so they do comparisons
| like
|
| - 99.998% if Carbon does not take part in Carbon Cycle, or
|
| - heat radiation from the sun is more than X by a scale of Y.
|
| But in balance, so any addition without compensation can
| compound to be fatal to human life on earth.
|
| After increasing the temperature by storing energy, then
| radiation off the surface and air layers will increase. But
| the heat build up is strongest at ground level, yet radiating
| to space is hardest from that layer. So the effectiveness of
| heat dispersal in a layered, in-vacuum geoid is not ideal.
|
| > Not _only_ [addition by me] by humans adding more heat
| under the existing blankets.
|
| Volker Quaschning hat an article, in german, on that. A
| comparable, unfavourable look on heat introduction instead
| for a post-co2 energy generation, was also cited in
| minkorrekt podcast (german, too).
|
| But that that is a small factor, too. I did back of the
| envelope calculation, and - if every of the 8 billion humans
| increases their consumption to western standards, - their
| energy from unlimited fusion or unlimited fission, earth
| still boils.
|
| It might be 2-5 % of the effect of greenhouse gases, by heat
| introduction is real and at scale deadly, too.
|
| With water, wind and solar, we have no added heat, since
| moving gases and fluids evoke heat anyway, which just is not
| converted to electricity in between. And solar changes the
| albedo of the place where the panel was placed to a
| reflectivity of that of a green meadow, which might be worse
| than some kinds of coating, but usually is better then other
| roof tiling [citing needed, do IR/VIS-white-painted roofs
| exist?].
|
| TL;DR: Smaller problem by a few orders of magnitude, but
| unless dangerous geoengineering takes place[1], still
| unsustainably cooks mankind.
|
| [1]: Please don't. IPCC report says "keep the idea of
| geoengineering out of media, for it is not a solution but
| pandora's jar"
| zapataband1 wrote:
| Interesting way of putting it, thanks for the explanation
| audunw wrote:
| I was surprised to learn how significant the heat added from
| thermal power plants can be for global warming. Without
| technological improvements a massive scale up of nuclear energy
| would probably be a bad idea.
|
| There are panels that can radiate heat directly to space
| though. So it has made me wonder if the nuclear power plants of
| the future could use such panels to radiate their heat directly
| to space. Essentially they'd be like reverse solar power
| plants, that also work at night. Wonder if it's feasible and
| economical.
|
| Personally, I think the future will mainly just be solar,
| hydro, geothermal and energy storage. As world population
| decline we'll end up having more than enough materials if we
| recycle them. Energy use will go drastically down.
|
| Question is if we need nuclear in the transition.
|
| And we should have nuclear R&D anyway as we need it for space
| exploration.
| Matumio wrote:
| Seriously? Everything on earth's surface is radiating thermal
| energy into space. In such a massive amount that you'll feel
| a distinct temperature drop in a cloudless night. If you want
| to radiate more heat into space (at a global level), you'd
| have to start by removing the clouds, or the greenhouse
| gasses.
| skissane wrote:
| > Many different units are used to discuss large quantities of
| energy. The graph above uses "quads", or quadrillion (10^15)
| British Thermal Units. The SI unit of energy is the joule, and a
| comparable quantity is the exajoule (EJ),
|
| Why use "quads" instead of exajoules? I really don't understand
| the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like
| pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well
| that isn't SI (although it is based on SI), but I can at least
| see the point to it. But "quadrillion BTUs" and calling that
| "quads" doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose
| yawaramin wrote:
| It's explained in the post. It makes the total amount be
| roughly 100 quads, which makes it easy to estimate all the
| numbers in the graphic as percentages.
| skissane wrote:
| Given an exajoule and a quad are close in value, you'd get
| roughly the same result with exajoules instead.
|
| Also, the fact that total US energy consumption is currently
| roughly 100 quads is only a passing coincidence - it would
| not have been true in the past and will not be true in the
| future. It is weird to justify choice of unit on the basis of
| a temporary coincidence in the data
| yawaramin wrote:
| The post is about a specific point in time, not for all
| time. So there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of a
| temporary alignment in the data.
| brutusborn wrote:
| I agree it's annoying. I think it comes from historically
| defining large energy sources such as gas formations in BTU.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional
| nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder.
|
| It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can
| use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting
| part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and
| people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.
| monkaiju wrote:
| People also dont like to mention that even the current, far
| from 'green', extraction is because we currently only mine the
| easiest to access deposits of uranium. There are not many of
| these and we would shortly need to start accessing much more
| challenging (read: dirty) deposits were we to scale nuclear.
|
| Also of the handful of breeder reactors we have (i think the
| only 2 running are in Russia) they are incredibly far from
| economical and have a really annoying tendency to catch fire...
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because
| nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors,
| economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to
| mention it's the best source of base load without creating
| massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste
| ben_w wrote:
| Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making
| fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just
| look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power
| grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we
| want regardless within each national power grid.
|
| People demand a safety standard from fission which is
| expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and
| when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even
| despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The reason people demand higher standards is history.
|
| An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam
| from confinement during serious accidents when the steam
| has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the
| confinement system. These were added to most European
| reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add
| these, saying the cost wasn't worth it.
|
| Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors there had these
| systems, the radioactive release would have been reduced by
| a factor of 100.
| Joeri wrote:
| China and Russia do not build and run nuclear power plants at
| dramatically lower costs, despite having none of those
| handicaps.
|
| Edit: Hmm, actually, I find wildly diverging LCOE numbers in
| different locations online. Some indicate they build at half
| the cost from France, while others say at a similar cost. So,
| if anyone knows which LCOE numbers are reliable please
| indicate.
| pyrale wrote:
| From what I understand, Lazard's LCOE, which are quoted
| everywhere, mainly rely on US numbers. That means they
| probably are reliable for US situations.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil
| exports, so there may at least be some incentive there to
| suppress it. China on the other hand, had quadrupled its
| nuclear power generation in the past 10 years (1).
|
| (1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2023/05
| /17/h...
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil
| exports...
|
| All the more reason for them to build nuclear plants.
| Every barrel of oil that their own economy doesn't need
| (because they have plenty of nuclear plants) is another
| barrel they can make money exporting. And if or when
| using oil becomes unfashionable, or their oil reserved
| start running low...then being recognized experts on how
| to build & run lots of safe, economical nuclear plants
| sounds pretty good, eh?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Nuclear competes with natural gas and coal, not oil.
|
| Beyond powering the grid, there are myriad uses for oil
| that nuclear cannot substitute directly for- asphalt,
| plastic, nylon, even Aspirin (synthesized from benzene).
| chrisco255 wrote:
| And yet the biggest use of petroleum by far is for
| transportation. Worldwide demand for petroleum would
| plunge 90+% if all cars were electric and nuclear was
| fully deployed.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Uh, no. Only two thirds of petroleum used in America is
| used for transportation, and that includes _all_
| transportation. You cannot possibly get a 90+% reduction
| in petroleum use by electrifying all cars.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-
| produc...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| So by that chart, a barrel of oil is basically 89% used
| to generate gasoline, distillate fuel oil (diesel),
| hydrocarbon gas, and jet fuel. That is to say, 89% is
| used for energy and 11% or less is used for plastic,
| asphault, and materials. That 27% industrial figure on
| the right chart includes things like propane production,
| which is mainly used as a heat source (nuclear could
| absolutely replace this).
|
| Either way, if your economy is dependent on oil exports,
| whether you were to lose 2/3 of that or 9/10 of that
| business, you're going to be hurting, and you might not
| rush to refactor your economy around nuclear.
| pyrale wrote:
| > without billions in red tape
|
| I would prefer to keep the red tape, thank you very much.
|
| Sure, nuclear is an expensive industry, but it's also a very
| safe industry, and I believe we should keep this part of it.
| fsflover wrote:
| The parent didn't say "without reasonable safety measures".
| See also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-risk_bias
|
| and
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36751041
| hedora wrote:
| The French managed to. I guess they have super-human
| engineering prowess.
|
| The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based
| design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch
| for each plant.
|
| Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you
| could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit
| board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors,
| then hand coding process scheduling and I/O.
|
| The French did this totally unprecedented novel thing where
| they manufacture more than one identical part at a time in a
| line of assembly stations, and the parts of the plants are
| interchangeable. I doubt such things transfer to other
| countries or industries though.
| devonkim wrote:
| You'd be better using South Korea as an example rather than
| France these days. To add more context, South Korea is an
| incredibly, incredibly corrupt country that sends its exiting
| president to prison to the extent that I joke that we need a
| special prison just for presidents. Yet there are basically
| no nuclear accidents at the kind of scale that we saw from
| Japan. 100% speculating but it's almost as if the nuclear
| power plants are used as a deterrent and part of the national
| security apparatus perhaps similar to the logic that Ukraine
| may have had in the past.
|
| The anti-nuclear crusade in the West is a bit worrisome given
| that if we had been better at dealing with nuclear as a whole
| there would be less coal and gas power plants all over the
| West now. As much as I can sympathize with the concerns about
| nuclear power related supply chain issues and risks of
| meltdowns + radiation almost all the problems I've seen in
| nuclear across countries and cultures don't come down to
| technical issues as much as structural ones due 90%+ to
| politics causing massive over-regulation of nuclear to become
| unviable both financially and politically. This seems silly
| because I strongly believe such efforts should be directed at
| the much greater, immediate, far more supportable threat to
| humanity's IMO of fossil fuels. Of course we kind of depend
| upon them now but given the problems we had from the 1980s
| into the 2000s with fossil fuels all the way to now the kind
| of resources we could have spent on renewables may have had
| better results simply stepping away from lobbying constantly
| against nuclear power and letting engineers do their best
| work in all areas of energy research.
|
| Seriously, almost all the "but nuclear costs too much"
| arguments are a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad faith where
| people pile on more and more requirements like it's a really
| bad DoD project when it's much more complicated honestly. US
| DoD has operated tons and tons of nuclear reactors, for
| example, quite successfully with a pretty darn good safety
| record last I saw despite all sorts of other failures within
| the US Jobs Program - they're used in submarines!
| Panino wrote:
| > The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-
| based design
|
| Wikipedia has a list of nuclear reactors in France.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran.
| ..
|
| According to the list, most power plants came online in the
| 1980s, so it doesn't sound like they "keep building" more of
| them. The most recent ones, Civaux and Chooz-B, came online
| in 2000. Flamanville appears to be incorrectly stated as
| having came online in 2020. Clicking the link, you see that
| its 2 reactors came online in 1986 and 1987, and as for the
| third one -- "as of 2020 the project is more than five times
| over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety
| problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel
| used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were
| announced, pushing back the commercial introduction date to
| the end of 2022. In January 2022, more delays were announced,
| with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023, and again in
| December 2022, delaying fuel loading to early 2024."
|
| All of the nuclear reactors in France were built by previous
| generations.
|
| As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and
| nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the
| need for created energy.) However I only really see nuclear
| proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables.
| And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents
| making widespread demonstrably false statements. My rooftop
| solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my
| neighbors with energy for their AC etc. I think nuclear
| proponents who say that nuclear is so cheap and so easy
| should prove it by building their own nuclear reactors and
| make tons of money. Go ahead, just do it. Stop talking and do
| it.
| opo wrote:
| >As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and
| nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the
| need for created energy.)
|
| I think many of the people who aren't anti-nuclear, would
| agree with all that.
|
| >However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of
| fossil fuels) attacking renewables.
|
| I rarely see that here. What I tend to see are people who
| don't like the idea of nuclear power making misleading or
| false statements about nuclear power. (Like in the original
| message of this thread where the claim is made "After 70
| years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional
| nuclear reactor.")
|
| >My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus,
| supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc.
|
| This statement is true in one small sense and misleading in
| another. You are likely providing excess power during a
| sunny day in the summer and less power than you are using
| when it rains and you are providing no power at other times
| (like at 2:00 AM.). While at the end of the year you might
| produce more kilowatts than you in total used, that isn't
| going to help your neighbors when it is raining. The only
| issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most
| expensive form of power ever created and consequently has
| to be heavily subsidized by your neighbors who don't have
| rooftop solar.
| rewmie wrote:
| > (...) consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most
| expensive form of power ever created (...)
|
| Care to show the basis of your personal assertion? It's
| an extraordinary and unbelievable claim.
| opo wrote:
| This is not my assertion and has been covered in
| discussions on this web site for a long time.
|
| >Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential
| buildings have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs
| of energy generation in the United States. If not for
| federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come
| with a price tag between 147 and 221 U.S. dollars per
| megawatt hour.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-
| leveliz...
|
| The latest report from Lazard on LCOE also gives similar
| numbers:
|
| https://www.lazard.com/media/typdgxmm/lazards-lcoeplus-
| april...
|
| It would be extraordinary if these one-off rooftop solar
| photovoltaic installations would be low cost. They are
| more dangerous to install than ground based solar farms
| and much more costly - the real question is why are they
| so heavily subsidized? It really is sort of a reverse
| Robinhood scenario where less well off consumers
| subsidize their wealthier neighbors.
| godelski wrote:
| A problem with both nuclear-bros as well as anti-nuclear
| folks is that they tend to get their information through
| armchair experts who oversimplify extremely complex
| topics. Neither group tends to understand the real
| reasons for costs, the risks and dangers of technologies
| (including other than nuclear, for proper comparisons),
| or even the complexities of simply emissions which is far
| more than electricity and transportation and includes
| daily and seasonal fluxuations across an extremely non-
| homogeneous landscape.
|
| FWIW, the IPCC advocates for a diversified portfolio
| which includes nuclear, and this is the general stance of
| most climate and energy researchers as the simplified
| version of reasoning (I know, ironic) is "don't take it
| off the table." When to use it, how much, and where is
| more controversial, but this gets extremely complicated
| quite quickly. It's rather problematic when the people
| disseminating information (i.e. science communicators;
| both on youtube as well as news) are not actively aligned
| with scientific consensus.
| cauch wrote:
| > I rarely see that here. What I tend to see are people
| who don't like the idea of nuclear power making
| misleading or false statements about nuclear power. (Like
| in the original message of this thread where the claim is
| made "After 70 years of trying we haven't built an
| economic traditional nuclear reactor.")
|
| I think it's just easier to notice "misleading or false
| statements" when they contradict what we like to think
| rather than when they are going in the same direction.
|
| For example, are you 200% sure of your sentence "The only
| issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most
| expensive form of power ever created"? Is that true
| everywhere, all the time? Because if not, how is that not
| as much as "misleading or false statements" than the
| original sentence you quote? But of course, this sentence
| of yours does not strike you as misleading, because you
| truly believe it's not misleading.
|
| Also, while I don't think the anti-nuclear are less
| numerous or less idiot, the pro-nuclear usually are also
| very very prone to think they are smarter when they are
| not, and start using bullying method to "fight the
| infidels", which, at least in my circle which are
| neutral, is really starting to make that side looks bad.
| pyrale wrote:
| > However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those
| of fossil fuels) attacking renewables.
|
| The reverse is pretty much true too. It seems like both
| renewables and nuclear proponents should be taking turns
| bashing fossil fuels, but since both see each other as a
| competitor for "the future of power", that's where the
| banter goes.
|
| > And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents
| making widespread demonstrably false statements.
|
| You don't have to go further than this thread to find false
| statements about nuclear.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The French have discovered that they vastly underestimated
| end-of-life costs. And the power having been sold and used at
| a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and
| truly screwed.
| pyrale wrote:
| > And the power having been sold and used at a price that
| did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed.
|
| I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in
| actual reasonable sources.
|
| Actual serious sources [1] report funding is being set
| aside for dismantling, which may be significantly eased by
| the fact that these reactor are actually going to serve for
| longer than expected.
|
| [1], in french: https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-0
| 3/20200304-rappor...
| Zigurd wrote:
| https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-really-cost-to-
| decomm...
|
| _Whereas Germany has set aside EUR38 billion to
| decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear
| Decommissioning Authority estimates that clean-up of UK's
| 17 nuclear sites will cost between EUR109-250 billion
| over the next 120 years, France has set aside only EUR23
| billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors._
|
| That's about 6X less than Germany, per reactor. When is
| the last time that kind of project came in under budget?
| pyrale wrote:
| The article is from 2017, yet reports number from 2013.
| In 2017, the total provisioning was 28~BnEUR. Also French
| reactor are still working (and producing returns), as
| opposed to German reactors.
|
| If you focus on dismantling costs, the example of Maine
| Yankee [1]: is way less dramatic: "In January 2002 Maine
| Yankee put the total decommissioning cost at $635
| million."
|
| The number provided for UK reactors is ludicrous compared
| to existing dismantling costs, and simply factors in 150
| years of dry cask storage, whereas France has a deep
| storage facility on the way.
|
| Also the author, Paul Dorfman, is an anti-nuclear
| proponent, it's not surprising to see this kind of
| numbers from him.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dismantling-
| nucle...
| Zigurd wrote:
| The numbers are from the respective national nuclear
| authorities.
|
| Also, as of 2019, the ongoing cost of securing spent fuel
| at Maine Yankee is about $10M per year. At what point
| does the spent fuel storage there age out and need
| replacement?
| pyrale wrote:
| > The numbers are from the respective national nuclear
| authorities.
|
| And, when it comes to France, the author chose to use 4
| year-old numbers.
|
| > At what point does the spent fuel storage there age out
| and need replacement?
|
| As I said, France doesn't plan to store its spent fuel in
| dry casks. The current plan is to store it in a deep-
| storage facility similar to Onkalo.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >>> And the power having been sold and used at a price
| that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly
| screwed. >I don't know where you read that, but that's
| nowhere in actual reasonable sources.
|
| We know for a fact that France nationalized EDF last year
| and the debt is at currently 65 bn euros and growing.
| Since the company has been nationalized, the taxpayers
| are on the hook.
|
| I wouldn't personally go so far as to say they're
| "screwed" but it's a documented economic fact that
| nuclear power in France has been sold at a loss, and
| still is.
|
| Note that this debt is already real, whereas the cost of
| decommissioning and storing waste for hundreds of years
| is guesswork no matter which source you use. Operations
| in France are proven not to cover costs even before we
| get to that!
| pyrale wrote:
| The debt doesn't come from unit costs, EDF has been
| profitable for decades with the current rates.
| FredPret wrote:
| Even if they did, having sold the power for less than it
| cost would've stimulated investment in the economy that can
| pay for that now.
| adrianN wrote:
| It is my understanding that the French massively subsidize
| nuclear power because they essentially run it as a job
| program to keep nuclear engineers employed so that they can
| build nuclear bombs.
| pyrale wrote:
| France produced military nuclear fuel in separate
| facilities, with separate engineers.
|
| Also, France stopped producing military-grade radioactive
| fuel since 1996, when the Pierrelatte military factory
| closed [1].
|
| [1], in french: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_militai
| re_de_Pierrelatte
| cycomanic wrote:
| Except for the fact that french nuclear power is highly
| subsidized (partly by military budgets, partly other
| subsidies, partly by grossly underfunding for storage and
| decommissioning costs, which they are required to put funds
| aside for), is breaking at the seams last year for some time
| >80% of the power generation was down in France due to
| maintenance (picked up by "intermittent solar and wind").
| Zealotux wrote:
| Every time the fact nuclear power is subsidized is being
| brought up, I can't help but think of how much energy, in
| general, is highly subsidized, like other fossils and
| renewables. What makes it special in the case of nuclear?
| pyrale wrote:
| > last year for some time >80% of the power generation was
| down in France due to maintenance
|
| Oh, so low? I heard it was 102%, and we had to activate the
| hamster wheels in order to make up for the deficit?
|
| Hint: Nuclear isn't even 80% of France's nuclear production
| when every reactor is up.
| pyrale wrote:
| > The French managed to. I guess they have super-human
| engineering prowess.
|
| As a french Engineer, I can confirm this. For work inquiries,
| please reach me at pyrale@oversized.ego
|
| > The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-
| based design
|
| In fact, we don't keep building them. The last N4 reactor was
| delivered in 2003. Since then, aside from the failed joint-
| venture with Germany that is the EPR, France essentially
| delivered nothing. That's not really an engineering issue so
| much as a political one.
|
| Also France didn't "keep building the same reactor", and
| didn't build "obsolete" reactors. From the initial reactors
| (the CP generation) to the N4, the buildings got larger, late
| reactors produced 60% more energy than the original ones, and
| significant safety improvements were made. Safety changes
| were also backported on previous installations. In fact, the
| major reason why Framatome freed itself from the Westinghouse
| license is that it provided significant independent
| contribution to the original design.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Why does it seem we can't build complicated things like we
| used to? The same seems to be true here in the US as well.
| pyrale wrote:
| The French and the US reasons are, from what I
| understand, quite different. I don't know the US
| situation that well.
|
| In France, many factors were involved:
|
| * France over-producing power for decades around y2k,
| which meant it was hard to commit the country to build
| more nuclear reactors.
|
| * The EPR being an over-engineered fiasco due to it being
| designed in a Franco-German partnership which quickly
| folded, but the design was kept.
|
| * The privatization of the energy sector involved a lot
| of restructuring for EDF, and the creation of Areva. This
| had a lot of involvement, but the main one is that the
| state took a hands-off stance, and EDF and Areva started
| competing with each other rather than collaborating.
|
| * Areva got mismanaged quite heavily. People like to
| point out the Olkiluoto fiasco, but what really killed
| the company was the Uramin scandal.
|
| * Politicians since 2007 started asking hefty dividends
| from public companies, involving EDF, in order to prop up
| the government's budget. That created an investment
| deficit, and significant debt for EDF.
|
| So yeah, lots of things, but the underlying issue seems
| to be that France used to have a culture of the state
| coordinating huge projects, which was lost with the new
| generation of politicians. There seems to be an appetite
| for new reactors, but the industry is significantly
| harmed by 20 years of political mixed signals, and
| whether the current politicians and the industry can
| deliver remains unclear.
| khuey wrote:
| Mostly because we prioritize other things over actually
| getting stuff built for a reasonable budget.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Isn't the Hualong One (both of them!) derived from French
| designs?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
| pyrale wrote:
| Yes, some of the older generations also got exported
| around. There's one in South Africa too IIRC, based on
| CP1 reactors.
| antonvs wrote:
| According to https://www.ad.nl/economie/duur-en-gevaarlijk-
| elke-kerncentr... (translated with Google):
|
| > "The leading German Institute for Economic Research (DIW)
| in Berlin investigated whether new nuclear power plants can
| indeed contribute to a clean(er) economy. The answer is
| negative: all 674 nuclear power plants that were built
| worldwide between 1951 and 2017 were built with substantial
| government subsidies. Without such support they would never
| have come about."
| fsflover wrote:
| > whether new nuclear power plants can indeed contribute to
| a clean(er) economy
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Of all the things the government can and does subsidize,
| cheap electricity seems like a pretty good one, especially
| if it's clean. I suppose that does lead to sillyness like
| bitcoin farms though.
| antonvs wrote:
| It's not an argument against government subsidies, it's
| just looking at the economic viability of nuclear power
| relative to other options.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Right. Does it account for positive / negative economic
| impact of (lack of) pollution?
| antonvs wrote:
| The goal, alluded to in the quote I provided, is to
| compare it to cleaner alternatives.
|
| The article I linked ends as follows:
|
| > "For all these reasons, nuclear energy, even though
| nuclear power is emission-free, is not a relevant
| solution for profitable, climate-friendly and sustainable
| energy in the future." According to the researchers,
| nuclear energy as a solution for climate protection is
| "an old narrative that is still as inaccurate as in the
| 1970s."
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Do those cost estimates include the absolutely insane over-
| engineering for safety that has been forced on the nuclear
| power industry and _only_ the nuclear power industry? I'd
| be shocked if a single other power generation method didn't
| double in price if it was forced to meet the same standards
| as nuclear. I guarantee you that the coal plants in Germany
| are killing more people every year than every single one of
| their Nuclear plants has combined over it's lifetime. And
| likely more than every single nuclear plant on the planet
| with the possible exception of Chernobyl
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying there should be no regulations,
| and that just anyone should be able to build any kind of
| reactor they want anywhere they want with no concerns for
| safety etc. But I do _very much think_ that when you are
| considering a technology that increases safety and also
| increases cost, you have to consider what the alternatives
| are. Are _they_ safer than whatever the current thing is?
| If you force it to be more expensive and more safe, are you
| going to get less of it and instead get the other, cheaper,
| more dangerous thing?
|
| That calculation has never been done (in the US at least)
| and the result is thousands to millions dead over the past
| 80ish years a result of continuing to burn coal instead of
| nuclear.
|
| The US nuclear safety regime (which is what makes it so
| expensive and so impractical) has no concept of tradeoffs.
| It imagines a hypothetical perfect power generation that
| never kills anyone to which nuclear should be held. That
| standard is ridiculous now and was ridiculous 50 years ago
| when nuclear was _already safer than coal_.
| three14 wrote:
| Not to pick on you, but every time this discussion
| happens on HN, someone argues that the nuclear power
| industry is burdened by far more red tape than other
| industries (probably true) and that if we simply reduce
| the red tape, we could profitably build new nuclear
| plants (probably true) and they would still be safe
| (probably not true). This isn't an engineering problem.
| This is a social problem. Suppose you offer to let people
| build with minimal regulation - the most profitable
| plants are going to be the ones that cut the most corners
| on safety. The great engineering team that made a safe
| but slightly more expensive reactor than the minimum
| allowed by regulation will be out of the market.
|
| And unsafe nuclear is really unsafe in a politically
| terrible way. You are doomed to either have Chernobyls or
| a lot of non-optimal regulation, or excellent regulation
| in the world of spherical cows and frictionless planes.
|
| Perhaps one of the new nuclear startups can find a
| solution to this, but it'll have to be by finding a way
| to mass produce nuclear within the existing heavy red
| tape regime. And in the real world, that's not a bad
| thing.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > And in the real world, that's not a bad thing
|
| It is a bad thing if the increased cost / pollution kills
| more people either directly or indirectly.
| fsflover wrote:
| > and they would still be safe (probably not true)
|
| Why do you think it's not true? Just look at the existing
| statistics that includes _old_ designs: https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant#/media/Fil...
| antonvs wrote:
| The comparison being discussed in the article I linked is
| with clean energy alternatives. In that respect, nuclear
| does need significantly more safety measures than wind or
| solar, for example.
|
| The problem with nuclear is that it's much more difficult
| to regulate effectively than most other industries,
| because the consequences of mistakes can be so much
| higher. E.g. Chernobyl contaminated food throughout much
| of Europe for months. The natural organizational reaction
| in that situation is to overcompensate.
|
| Nuclear is likely to always be expensive for that reason,
| because you're never going to get economy of scale as
| long as companies can't e.g. mass produce nuclear plants
| and set them up all over the place. I also generally
| agree with the other reply to your comment by three14.
|
| I consider this to be a pragmatic observation, not a
| judgment on whether nuclear might make sense in some
| hypothetical perfectly rational world.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I mean, how do you even compare that to the "subsidy" that
| petroleum gets from western foreign policy?
| Krasnol wrote:
| Why would you?
|
| It's not about subsidies for nuclear vs. fossil.
|
| It's about nuclear vs. renewables, and renewables look
| like a much better investment these days (and years)
| considering the budget explosions of recent nuclear
| projects.
| greatfilter250 wrote:
| [dead]
| ponorin wrote:
| [flagged]
| bigfryo wrote:
| I think we will outlive the Sun. I think it's possible that we
| will repair the Sun and prevent its death..
| peteradio wrote:
| How would you repair a sun? It would seem to defy some
| entropy laws but what do I know?
| petree wrote:
| A star is just a giant fusion reactor. We just need to add
| more fusion material (hydrogen) and remove the waste
| material, which gathers in the core and makes it more
| difficult for the fusion reaction to continue. It would be
| possible to prolong the life of the Sun for a while by
| adding more hydrogen to it, and ideally taking out the
| heavier elements at the center, which might also be
| valuable on their own. This seems pretty impossible today,
| but given we survive enough time until this becomes a
| problem, then we might find ways to also fix it.
| abecedarius wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
| gs17 wrote:
| I forgot what that term meant, and was imagining
| carefully swapping the sun with a different, younger,
| star.
| abecedarius wrote:
| When I first saw it in _Great Mambo Chicken and the
| Transhuman Condition_ , it followed with the quote "You
| need to take good care of your star or it gets all dark
| and icky." I suspect it was parodying some ad that
| must've gone like "...good care of your hair..."
| rayiner wrote:
| Nuclear is the only optimistic energy solution--I.e. one that
| could enable continually increasing human prosperity, rather than
| rationing. Forget simply replacing today's energy generation.
| That's sad. What does the future look like when we have 10 times
| as energy available? Moreover, technology that will "level up"
| civilization is almost certainly going to be an outgrowth of
| nuclear development, or something similarly energetic, rather
| than windmills or solar.
| a3w wrote:
| After having read the IPCC report, no. A mix of energy is a
| very viable solution. And if states would not cater to the
| needs of the nuclear industry, we would have zero plants right
| now because the price of electricity was never high enough to
| get the plants insured. Which might change if the price for
| power climbs, but with renewables on the rise, a limit to that
| rise or even decline is to be expected.
|
| And for some reason, mainstream social media loves nuclear, so
| I do question if there is a bias for a technology that every
| spacefaring state, except for india and china (AFAICT?), has
| botched at some catastrophic event so far.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I fear this sort of argument will fall on deaf ears here. This
| is a forum where tons of people believe rural/suburban people
| should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle. It works for
| them, so it should work for everybody else.. Getting people to
| live in dense urban housing and be dependent on public transit
| is considered a _desirable outcome_ , not a regrettable but
| necessary consequence of reducing emissions. Talk of reducing
| emissions is used as a justification, but isn't the root
| motivation for these urbanization advocates. Offering up
| technical solutions that reduce the environmental toll of the
| present social order isn't met with enthusiasm because it
| misses the point, which is to change up the social order.
|
| If you find a way to explain how nuclear reactors will get more
| people riding buses and bicycles in cities, then you'll have
| their attention.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > This is a forum where tons of people believe rural/suburban
| people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle.
|
| This is a forum where _a few_ people believe rural /suburban
| people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle, and
| say so very vocally. Don't mistake that for a consensus. It's
| not. You can find a _lot_ of other viewpoints here as well.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Okay fair, but they make sure to over-represent themselves
| in every HN conversation concerning power generation,
| cities, cars or bicycles.
|
| I think the style of argument rayiner is employing is
| essentially preaching to the choir; it won't land with
| people who derive their anti-nuclear stance from a pro-
| urbanization goal. And this seems to be the primary
| motivation of anti-nuclear people on HN specifically. In
| the general public, earnest if misguided concern for safety
| is more common than a pro-urbanization motive, but HN isn't
| representative of the general public.
| effed3 wrote:
| >What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy
| available?
|
| What does the future look like when we have 10 times the
| efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal.
|
| Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind
| coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10
| years ago this was unthinkable. This appear the true way of
| prosperity, not the growt of availability/consumption.
| zerodensity wrote:
| Having excess energy is great!
|
| We can use it for alot of useful stuff. For example to:
|
| - Recycle waste products. Most (not all) things are
| recyclable you just need the energy.
|
| - Grow food vertically so more land can be nature.
|
| - Siphon greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.
|
| - Desalinate Water
| effed3 wrote:
| About this i absolutely agree.. if there is an equal amount
| of wisdom.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Many of those extra things can be intermittent and shut
| down when excess power isn't available. Which means can
| overbuild solar and wind to satisfy everything but the
| worst case, and use the excess most of the time.
|
| The result is that don't need seasonal storage only daily
| storage. It is likely better to build more capacity than
| long-term storage. Although, generated fuels like hydrogen
| might work well for long-term storage.
| rayiner wrote:
| > What does the future look like when we have 10 times the
| efficency on energy use
|
| Energy efficiency improvements of that magnitude don't exist.
| In most industries, getting a 10% efficiency improvement
| would be groundbreaking. These are limits dictated by
| physics.
| effed3 wrote:
| True, an overall 10% improvement is a big number, one order
| of magnitude is SF now. But for single technologies, more
| than 10% is possible, internal combustion engines vs
| electric, incandescent light vs led.. So reasoning on the
| global efficiency (resource and energy use, recycling of
| materials, capture of wasted energy, ) is the mainline to
| go. IN nature photosynthesis is around 100% efficient.
| p1mrx wrote:
| > photosynthesis is around 100% efficient.
|
| It's closer to 2% efficient:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency#P
| lan...
| effed3 wrote:
| Ops, true, overall photosynthesis is low, i remembered
| some higher capture eff. at some wavelenghts.. (just
| retina photon conversion is about 50% IIRC)
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| > IN nature photosynthesis is around 100% efficient.
|
| If your measure of efficiency of photosynthesis is how
| much sunlight is turned into chemical energy, its in the
| low single digit percentages. C4 photosynthesis is
| something like ~4% efficient, C3 is lower still.
| cma wrote:
| It exists for some segments, it happened for household
| lighting.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > This is the right question/goal.
|
| No. I have seen the effects of this "goal" at scale in my
| personal life. Semi-non-effective HVAC systems that I now
| have to run 24/7/365, LED lights with weird flicker that
| perpetually antagonize me _everywhere_ , vehicles with
| obnoxious start/stop mechanisms that _absolutely_ induce
| premature wear (causing much more serious waste than
| otherwise). Oh yeah - my washing machine doesn 't really fill
| up with water all the way, so I run FOUR cycles just to make
| sure everything is properly rinsed. This one isn't even
| directly about energy (someone was trying to save water), but
| it consumes more energy as a consequence. Is this what the
| environmentalists were going for with the fake "deep fill"
| selector knob on my ultra-high "efficiency" machine?
|
| The people pushing "efficiency at any cost" are either
| completely blind to the idea of 2nd order+ consequences or
| are evil/anti-human. I cannot fathom a different set of
| options. Do you realize that you have to live on this damn
| planet with all these side-effects too?
|
| I am completely over it. Let's figure out how to make energy
| carbon free and infinite. Let's stop fucking over the user
| experience in _every possible way_ just so we can feel like
| we are doing something to "help".
| mcpackieh wrote:
| The water saving thing is truly obnoxious because water is
| a very regional issue. Why are people in regions with
| _more_ than ample fresh water made to use inferior toilets
| designed to use little fresh water? Because activists from
| dry places think their regional water problems are
| universal and try to foist their water-saving nonsense onto
| everybody else. They 're coming for high-flow shower-heads
| too; it takes me three times as long to rinse out my hair
| with those shower-heads so the water savings don't even
| exist. I think it's probably only a matter of time before
| they start making shower heads with built-in timers that
| force everybody to take navy showers.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > I think it's probably only a matter of time before they
| start making shower heads with built-in timers that force
| everybody to take navy showers.
|
| Moen already has a "smart" shower.
|
| https://www.moen.com/smart-home/smart-shower
| effed3 wrote:
| i solidarize with you about the madnees of this "over-
| everything", but maybe marketing department at the higher
| floors are to blame, more than environmentalist, usually
| they are not sitting in the executive boards...
| VonGuard wrote:
| One thing this doesn't really address is that the way you
| separate plutonium from uranium is via acid. At the end of the
| process, you have a barrel of radioactive acid to deal with. Not
| nice stuff to handle. Toxic AND corrosive waste.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| The pyrometallurgical methods of separation are a bit nicer.
| Way less liquid waste than Gen 1 WW2-era separations like
| PUREX.
|
| https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6...
| zokier wrote:
| If humans were perfect then all problems are trivial. In
| cryptography there is the idea of misuse resistance, and the same
| line of thinking applies to other fields where things are
| expected to be used at scale. Wind and solar are pretty much
| idiot-proof, and their low density means that the risks are
| spread out also.
|
| As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following
| the process of OL3, I am pretty pessimistic about current
| prospects of nuclear, especially in the timescales regarding
| climate change. Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now
| installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need
| replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to
| be effective tool (with our _current_ engineering /construction
| capability!) to combat climate change imho.
| yawaramin wrote:
| If you apply this logic universally then we basically can't
| have a modern human civilization, because airplanes,
| steelmaking, chemical manufacturing, and many other heavy
| industrial applications will also be considered too dangerous.
| This is exactly tackled in the post:
|
| > Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any
| human future which does not involve half-naked
| pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks
| massifist wrote:
| That's a little short-sighted. Wouldn't that pose a danger to
| the grubs?
|
| > Why won't anyone think of the GRUBS!!
| zerodensity wrote:
| > Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed
| wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but
| before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective
| tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to
| combat climate change imho.
|
| If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now
| it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables
| needs replacement.
|
| We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the
| damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a
| must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up
| to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there.
|
| Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract
| the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000
| land yes.
|
| Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it
| does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
| zokier wrote:
| > Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No,
| it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
|
| It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar
| away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more
| resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into
| fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that
| can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate
| impact. That is simply the nature of having existential
| crisis at our hands right now, not in some far future.
| coryrc wrote:
| Germany disproves this being a good idea. Incredible
| amounts invested in solar yet still wholly dependent on
| coal and natural gas to survive the winter.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Germany pumped a lot into solar a decade or so ago in
| order to drive solar down its experience curve. This was
| expensive, but it was a tremendous gift to the world. You
| can thank much of the game-changing decline in renewable
| prices on this sacrifice. If they wanted to buy that same
| capacity again it would be much cheaper now.
|
| The good experience effects of renewables and storage
| implies we should go full speed ahead installing them.
| The side effect of pushing down their prices makes this
| the most cost effective approach overall. Nuclear, which
| doesn't have good experience effects, is a different
| story entirely.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is
| dollar away from something else.
|
| That's not how things work. It's tempting to view money in
| such simple term but also very wrong. In effect, the state
| has a lot of leeway in how it decides to invest and a lot
| of conservative positions are taken to preserve the overall
| status quo when it comes to who has power and who hasn't.
| ttfkam wrote:
| How about every dollar put into the social and economic
| fallout of large swaths of Florida and Louisiana falling
| underwater? That sounds like a pretty significant
| opportunity cost to me.
| ben_w wrote:
| False dichotomy; nuclear currently costs about the same
| as the combination of PV with enough Li-Ion batteries
| that it kinda looks the same from a "baseload?"
| perspective, and Li-Ion is the most expensive of the
| various options currently vaguely near the right scale
| for storage in that kind of timeframe. From the
| "everything else except baseload?" perspective, PV can
| also be one of the cheapest power sources around.
|
| Also, because it's a global problem, the solution has to
| be something that everyone wants to have, and that
| everyone wants everyone else to have too, which means
| _we_ have to care that what powers Iran is green _and
| also_ Iran will care about not triggering another
| airstrike from Israel fearing it 's a secret atomic bomb
| project.
|
| PV in particular is also useful for being a continuous
| roll-out, so even if it worked out at exactly the same
| cost/joule as nuclear and taking exactly as long to reach
| the same final total average power output, getting the
| first joules sooner displaces more of the existing CO2
| emissions.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Yes, we are talking about base load. We have about a
| football field's worth of spent fuel sitting in casks and
| pools. That's not per reactor; that's in total in the US
| since we started running nuclear power stations. In fast
| neutron reactors, this could power all of the US
| electrical needs for 150 years without requiring any new
| sources of uranium (no mines, no seawater extraction,
| nothing!) AND would eliminate the need for 100,000+ year
| geological storage.
|
| Far more compact than batteries, wouldn't compete with
| other large scale transitions that need batteries like
| electric cars, and would work even during either a week-
| long blizzard, tornado, or hurricane.
|
| Batteries offset the power needs from dusk to dawn, but
| most solar farms do not build capacity for extended
| (multi-day to week) outages. A single tornado let alone a
| hurricane could wipe out gigawatts of solar or wind
| capacity. Containment domes on nuclear reactors by
| contrast wouldn't even blink at these kinds of natural
| disasters.
|
| We need solar. We need wind. We need geothermal. We need
| hydro. And we need nuclear to completely eliminate most
| fossil fuels from our energy cycle. We need some of all.
| Diversification in energy sources is a good thing.
|
| I strongly disagree that everyone needs the same
| solution. Some nations are extremely rich in wind while
| others are mostly devoid of it. Nations like Iceland have
| a ridiculous surplus of energy due to geothermal
| resources. Some nations have easy access to hydro while
| most don't. New Zealand could probably power twenty New
| Zealands on wind alone. Even in the US we see this in
| play. The South/Southeast have little to no wind
| resources at all but are VERY sensitive to severe weather
| events that would tear apart large solar arrays leaving
| millions without power for fall too long. In the North
| and center of the US, wind power is almost a no-brainer.
| High, consistent winds across the plains could offset
| many other forms of electricity generation, especially
| away from large bodies of water. Geography strongly
| guides which solutions are available.
|
| The US produces over 37 billion metric tons of CO2,
| making the U.S. responsible for 14% of global emissions
| on its own. Regardless of what other nations do (and I
| hope they continue toward de-carbonization), the US must
| take an aggressive role in reducing its own fossil fuel
| emissions within its borders, since those are the only
| emissions we can directly control. Diplomacy and economic
| incentives can only go so far across international
| borders, but building an maintaining ties overseas is
| obviously of great importance for that reason. None of
| this "America First" crap.
|
| As for domestic production of electricity, we are already
| out of sync with countries like Iran, regardless of what
| Israel does or does not do. We have 93 nuclear power
| plants. Iran has 1. The nuclear power (and weapon) genie
| is already out of the lamp. Everyone knows how to make a
| nuclear plant today. That said, Israel (and Iran) have
| other options like PV and especially solar thermal. They
| exist in a region where thermal masses could be used to
| great effect without concern of Plutonium proliferation.
|
| We absolutely, positively do NOT need every nation to get
| their power from the same sources. We only need them to
| get that power from sources other than fossil fuels.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Nuclear engineer here. I did a similar write-up (gratuitously
| leveraging GNU Units) since most people don't seem to know this
| fact about fission breeder reactors. I added some other
| references at the bottom of people pointing this out throughout
| nuclear fission's history.
|
| https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
|
| In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can
| breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones,
| you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.
| JackFr wrote:
| They had me until the antepenultimate paragraph:
|
| > Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human
| future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids
| digging for grubs with dull sticks, and design, construction,
| management, and operation of these facilities will require teams
| of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not
| metrics of "diversity", "equity", or "inclusion".
|
| For me that turned the whole piece from a level-headed well-
| reasoned argument from domain experts to a Facebook political
| rant. That isn't to say I agree or disagree with DEI initiatives,
| that sentence simply undermines the credibility of all that came
| before.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination,
| government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and
| operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents,
| fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other
| technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern
| civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious
| goals ("too cheap to meter") it originally seemed to promise.
|
| Perhaps that promise was empty?
|
| Blaming government regulation is especially a red flag to me
| here. It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating, even though
| the laws are, to put it mildly, draconian. With all that it's the
| safest mode on transportation by a wide margin.
|
| China is currently in the process of realizing nuclear power's
| potential and it appears that in terms of energy delivered it
| can't actually keep up with renewables - despite no systemic
| obstacles like in the west.
|
| Eventually everyone is going to just build renewable capacity and
| storage because that's simply the fastest, cheapest way to get
| energy.
|
| Developing countries especially have an interesting approach to
| renewables, because grids there are notoriously unreliable, so
| there's no expectation of having power 24/7. For this reason they
| opt for renewables instead of waiting for that nuclear power
| plant to happen.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| If nuclear safety rules would be applied to dams, we would need
| to tear them all down, because those devilish things killed
| thousand times more people than nuclear ever did.
|
| Also a big chemical plant failure has potential to kill more
| people than all nuclear failures combined - See Bhopal disaster
| roenxi wrote:
| > It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating
|
| Planes still crash from time to time. The regulations on the
| aviation industry are the ant version of regulations compared
| to the elephants that the nuclear industry has to put up with.
| planes are only 600x safer than driving by death toll [0]. That
| would be a shut-the-industry-down safety stat for nuclear
| plants.
|
| That is why people are pointing out the nuclear safety rules
| are stupid. There is no comparable regulation on any industry.
| If nuclear plants were regulated to airline safety levels I
| would just be saying "meh, too expensive" in HN debates on the
| subject. The fact that it is still in the running despite crazy
| regulatory requirements is why there is reason to think it'd be
| a new age of energy if the technology was regulated sensibly.
|
| [0] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-
| topics...
| gmerc wrote:
| Surely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a
| plane crash...
| roenxi wrote:
| It'll kill a lot less people than a plane crash.
| brazzy wrote:
| It could very, very easily kill a thousand times more.
|
| That we haven't seen anything like a worst case scenario
| for a unclear accident does not mean those are
| impossible.
| roenxi wrote:
| What do you think that worst case is, and how are you
| estimating it?
| brazzy wrote:
| Core meltdown and containment failure in (or near and
| upwind of) a megacity would be the obvious one.
|
| Another exciting option: unnoticed containment failure of
| waste storage, which contaminates huge amounts of
| groundwater over weeks and months before the contaminated
| water starts reaching a densely populated area.
|
| And don't tell me these things can't happen outside the
| Soviet Union. Greed and complacenty can always find a
| way.
| aeternum wrote:
| Nuclear radiation is much harder to hide compared to
| other forms of contamination.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Worst case is a continent wide Red Forest.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Chernobyl was a perfect storm of bad design, political
| corruption, and reckless behavior. No Western nuclear
| plant has ever run without a containment dome, has
| excluded basic plant design info from its operators, or
| put in incentives to run a reckless spin down experiment
| while also cutting all cooling and raising all control
| rods.
|
| Three Mile Island was close to worst possible in a
| Western design, and those aspects that led to that
| accident were fixed 45 years ago.
|
| Worst case isn't a nuclear accident at this point; it's
| continued reliance on fossil fuels and the accelerating
| effects from warming the planet. Huge swaths of land near
| the equator that will be rendered uninhabitable for large
| scale human habitation due to extreme heat events.
|
| We have already seen 129 degrees in those areas with a
| real heat index (due to humidity) of 142. These areas are
| already at their absolute limit. That's your continent-
| wide Red Forest.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Renewables capex already outstrips fossil fuels. Complete
| that transition and get all the power we need for less
| money, sooner, and you can buy private insurance at low
| rates to cover any risks.
| ttfkam wrote:
| How well do solar and wind infrastructures handle
| tornados and hurricanes? Also, consistent wind resources
| are notably absent in the South/Southeast. There are no
| Hoover Dam-like sites available there. Do you honestly
| expect to tell tens of millions of people that they
| should just be content with a single hurricane knocking
| out their electricity grid for a month? That's not
| realistic.
|
| You cannot plan an electrical future on the hope that the
| weather is always pleasant and consistent. This is one of
| the reasons why fossil fuel dominance continues in those
| regions. Go ahead and draw a map of those places where
| hurricanes and tornados are most prevalent and their
| large scale adoption of solar and wind. They're not
| stupid. They're not just political. There are real
| concerns you are handwaving away because you (likely)
| like in a region that does not have these same concerns.
|
| What works for California will not work for Georgia,
| Florida, or Nebraska as-is. Baseball-size hail destroys
| huge solar arrays let alone softball-size [0]. Nuclear
| plants laugh at hail and would handle and have(!)
| weathered tornados and hurricanes just fine.
|
| Check the numbers. Even accounting for nuclear disasters
| outside the US like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the number
| of deaths attributed to nuclear power per unit of
| electricity is lower than any fossil fuel, lower than
| wind, and about equal to solar. Just imagine if we put
| the same R&D force behind nuclear that we've done for
| solar. You think solar's cheap? It wasn't ten years ago.
| It was intense investment that made it so. We have the
| same potential for nuclear.
|
| At the very least, we should be aggressively working
| toward fast neutron reactors so that we don't have spent
| fuel that will remain dangerously radioactive for
| 100,000+ years. We can "burn" that "waste" and supply the
| entire current need for US electrical production for the
| next 150 years without mining a single new kilogram of
| uranium [1].
|
| [0] https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-
| sized-hail-...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc
| Zigurd wrote:
| Renewable power sources have risks. Renewable power
| operators can buy insurance against those risks. Can
| nuclear plant operators buy insurance against nuclear
| risks? Or are taxpayers on the hook for that?
| urinotherapist wrote:
| > At the very least, we should be aggressively working
| toward fast neutron reactors so that we don't have spent
| fuel that will remain dangerously radioactive for
| 100,000+ years. We can "burn" that "waste" and supply the
| entire current need for US electrical production for the
| next 150 years without mining a single new kilogram of
| uranium
|
| So, you propose to increase number of regulations and
| total cost of the nuclear energy, right?
| ttfkam wrote:
| I propose to solve the waste problem in the most
| constructive way I am aware of.
| pfdietz wrote:
| This whole thread is about breeder reactors. The worst
| case (for a fast reactor) is the reactor rearranging in a
| meltdown and going prompt fast supercritical, resulting
| in a honest-to-god nuclear explosion. And remember a fast
| breeder is going to have tonnes of plutonium in that
| core, not the kilograms of a fission weapon.
| urinotherapist wrote:
| If Russia will blow up Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant in
| Ukraine, then huge area of productive land and sea can be
| heavily contaminated, which can lead to global famine,
| which can kill millions.
| krupan wrote:
| We haven't seen anything like a worst case scenario for
| [insert any energy source here]. So?
|
| Covering too much land in solar panels could have dire
| long-term effects that we don't even know. Sucking too
| much energy out of the air with windmills could too. All
| energy sources have risks.
| brazzy wrote:
| We absolutely have seen worst case failures for
| everything except perhaps dam failures. Your solar and
| windmill speculations are completely implausible, relying
| on nebulous things "we don't know".
|
| But we know _exactly_ how badly nuclear reactors can
| fail, we know _exactly_ how widely nuclear contamination
| can spread, and we know _exactly_ what it can do to
| people. The results if those things happened on a large
| scale in a densely populated area are not speculative at
| all.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Kill is anyway a very bad metric for something that (if
| at all) will only manifest in some dice rolls of many
| dice probabilities involved in the cancer and other
| illnesses rolling game. In that sense, always surprised
| that deaths by coal exhaust get fully overattributed, but
| that this is completely ignored (e.g. when also claiming
| that Tschernobyl caused only few deaths, while we see a
| lot of young people still suffering today). Hard to take
| it serious then :/
| ajuc wrote:
| Less people died in Fukushima accident than dies yearly
| because of coal powerplants pumping radioactive materials
| into atmosphere.
|
| If you calculate radioactive materials released per energy
| produced - nuclear is below coal, even including all the
| accidents.
|
| It's irrational to avoid nuclear powerplants.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Have you seen the economic costs of the cleanup operation
| though? It's absolutely astronomical (for various
| reasons). That money is not money going to new nuclear
| plants or renewables, but going to nowhere.
|
| This effects people too.
|
| Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing
| the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending
| on how you look at it) Is this controversial or
| something? Is that not a lot of money and an unaccounted
| for cost of nuclear?
| [deleted]
| roenxi wrote:
| > Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing
| the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion?
|
| 1) That isn't an astronomical number. It is $2,000-$8,000
| per Japanese person. For a freak accident. Put that in
| $/kWh terms and you might find that nuclear was
| reasonably cost effective even in one of the worst
| nuclear disasters in history, let alone under normal
| conditions.
|
| 2) I don't know if it is controversial; although if the
| people demanding the cleanup are the same lunatics who
| regulate the industry in the west I want to see what the
| justification is for spending $100s of billions of
| dollars.
|
| 3) The cleanup cost should be considered. When we
| multiply probability by cost it will be a short
| consideration. There is no way it is as bad as what
| everyone is currently already doing with coal. It is
| likely that it will also be better than renewables once
| waste is factored in, just because the volumes of
| material involved.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Pretty sure the cleanup costs for continued use of coal,
| oil, and natural gas due to global climate change far
| exceed any from nuclear, including even Chernobyl.
|
| Entire nations are disappearing under the rising seas
| [0]. So far they are relatively poor and lack political
| influence. Bangladesh is soon for the chopping block.
| Louisiana and Florida are not far behind. Folks really
| don't get how close to sea level massive portions of
| these very large areas are. Far larger than the Fukushima
| exclusion zone, that's for sure.
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/tuvalu-turns-
| metaverse-...
| Dah00n wrote:
| Nuclear competes with renewables going forward.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Not until fossil fuels are eliminated for all practical
| purposes. The only real competition we have today is
| against global climate change. Once we get past that
| hump, we can quibble about non-carbon-emitting details.
|
| As long as coal, oil, and natural gas are burned and
| released into the atmosphere, the economic "competition"
| going forward is illusory. We're just buying the
| mitigation and cleanup efforts on credit.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Also worth pointing out that there are plenty of low-
| lying inland areas both critical to the global economy
| and vulnerable to damage from climate change. Relevant to
| my own background: California's Central Valley sits
| pretty darn close to sea level, and is _already_
| dependent on rather elaborate levee systems to keep
| floodwaters and delta seawaters at bay. Said region
| produces large swaths of the world 's entire supply of
| various fruits and vegetables; that farmland turning into
| ocean (a very real risk per various climate models) would
| be catastrophic for the global supply of said produce.
|
| And that's just around sea level rise. The Central
| Valley's water issues are another probable symptom of
| global climate change, and just because the Valley lucked
| out with a wet winter this year doesn't mean that luck
| will persist. If push comes to shove, I'm sure
| California's agricultural sector would much rather invest
| the billions necessary for desalination and upgraded
| levees to address those symptoms than abandon California
| entirely - but those are still costs being thrust upon
| California due to a continued reliance on fossil fuels.
| coryrc wrote:
| Fukushima direct cleanup costs are $15B:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/10/after-
| fiv...
|
| $60B in refugee compensation.
|
| And $200B because they stopped using nuclear for a while
| as an overreaction.
|
| Oh, and the tsunami+earthquake cost over $250B
| independent of the nuclear accident.
|
| Your number is FUD.
| otherme123 wrote:
| I had suffered the downvoting on reddit before: write
| something backed with data against nuclear (specially if
| your source is a pro-nuclear report), and in less than 5
| minutes you get -10 and no replies.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Sure, it's Reddit. Point out that Europe and EU isn't the
| same and you get 50-100 downvotes in a discussion where
| the difference matters followed by a boatload of snarky
| responses. But this isn't Reddit. Here the same snark and
| opinions are put in pretty packages to avoid mods, but
| it's still there. Look at any mention of China or
| Socialism for example.
| ponorin wrote:
| the exclusion zone of fukushima hasn't changed since the
| beginning even after 10+ years. same for pripyat and
| chernobyl, those already close to 40 years. UK had to
| test sheep for radioactivity in certain domestic areas up
| until 2012.
|
| nuclear damages aren't just dead humans. they come in the
| forms of lost lands and untrustable food source.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| I'd wager the amount of livable and arable land we'll
| lose due to continued fossil fuel usage would be greater
| than having a Fukushima every year.
| Zigurd wrote:
| This is an interesting argument and let's stipulate it is
| correct. In that case, take all the oil capex and spend
| it on power sources that are least costly, least risky,
| and come on line fastest. Who thinks nuclear is least
| costly, least risky, and arrives soonest? Anyone?
| Bueller?
| yawaramin wrote:
| The problem with those power sources-and this has been
| pointed out many, many times-is they don't make reliable
| base load power. The sun doesn't shine at night-no solar
| power. Winds don't blow on calm days-no wind power.
|
| You are forced to build massive battery farms. Batteries
| require mining chemicals. For the scale we are talking
| about, you would be strip-mining the earth.
|
| You are forced to make incredibly costly upgrades to
| electric grids-some of which are nearly a century old.
| Because the current grids can't handle the unreliable,
| wax-and-wane nature of solar and wind power.
|
| You are forced to build gigantic solar panel and wind
| farms, destroying vast swathes of natural ecology and
| displacing and destroying many species.
|
| You are forced to deal with solar panels and wind
| turbines at the end of life problem, especially solar
| panels which contain toxic chemicals which are at risk of
| leaching into the environment (think 'water table')
| unless they are properly disposed of. No one has a viable
| plan for proper disposal of solar panels at the scale we
| would have to be talking about.
|
| And finally-the elephant in the room. The giant energy
| corporations just won't transition to renewable energy if
| they don't get a high-enough return on their investments.
| They want something like 12% ROI. This is extremely
| unlikely. They've left all their commitments to go
| renewable conditional so they can weasel out by saying
| it's not cost-effective for them. Just look at what's
| happening in reality:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/23/siemens-energy-scraps-
| profit...
| Zigurd wrote:
| Nothing about renewables is speculative. Renewables
| build-out is the largest share of energy capex. If
| renewables were "destroying many species" it would be all
| over the news. The 1980s called and wants their "solar
| will never..." argument back.
| yawaramin wrote:
| If that's your only response to all my points, then I
| think we're done here.
| krupan wrote:
| How big are the areas that solar farms cover compared to
| that exclusion zone?
|
| How big will the exclusion zones of Climate Change be if
| we keep burning fossil fuels?
| yellowapple wrote:
| Out of curiosity, I decided to do some napkin math on
| this.
|
| The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant produced 4.7GWe when
| it was operational, and its current exclusion zone covers
| an area of 230 square miles - or 0.0204 GW/mi^2.
|
| The US has (according to
| https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-
| power-us...) 102.9GWe of solar capacity covering an area
| of 965 square miles - or 0.1GW/mi^2.
|
| Judging by that, a nuclear disaster's exclusion zone _is_
| worse than that of a "solar disaster" (so to speak).
|
| _However_ , the Fukushima plant itself occupies 1.34375
| square miles - putting its normal-operation figure at
| 3.498 GW/mi^2. That's _considerably_ better than the land
| area occupied by a Fukushima-equivalent solar
| installation. The question, therefore, is whether a
| better worst-case figure for land destruction justifies a
| substantially-worse best-case figure; I don 't think it
| does, but I understand that not everyone would agree.
| effed3 wrote:
| All the analysis like this forget to count the cost of
| decommissioning the nuclear technology, reactors and fuels. Cost
| for end of life reactors are an order of magnitude those of
| contruction, and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist, both
| payed by -public-.
|
| The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years
| and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact
| are to count in, not easy to calculare, but is not like a plane
| crash, not at all.
|
| The rise energy consumption in developing countries is driven
| mainly by the use of -old- technology, this is forced by
| economic/financial reasons. If all the world, developing or not,
| will adopt more efficient energy resource -and- use, the numbers
| will be very different.
|
| Uranium resources extimation will not count the cost of
| extracting and market pricing evolution, just like fossil fuels,
| the last drops are the most difficult/costly ones.
|
| Frankly is not a true wide and deep analysis.
|
| One key of green energy is the distributed nature of
| solar/wind/water sources, less losses for transport, less
| dipendence on big company, more public control.
|
| Anoter key issue is the adoption of more efficiency on energy
| use. EG: is worthless to adopt led for public illumination
| replacing 100w sodium lamp with 100w led, Better to use led to
| obtain the same illumination result ( or less, is we care to not
| illuminate the belly of airplanes).
|
| The growing numbers in energy consumption are mainly from the
| -old- idea: growt = development, but in nature the only things
| with illimitate growt are entropy ( tax and cancer are a good
| candidates too)
| Detrytus wrote:
| Nuclear technology is safe enough, and the storage of the waste
| is non-issue: the amount of waste produced thorough last 80
| years since we first split atom would fit in a single storage
| facility of the size of the football stadium. If we want to
| move away from fossil fuels then the nuclear is our best bet,
| solar and wind are just impractical toys.
| effed3 wrote:
| > Nuclear technology is safe enough "enough" is a point of
| view, is your, so ok for you, not enough for me. Fukushima
| was not enough safe, but again, for me. And there are many
| others "not enough" situations others than 3 famous.
|
| > storage of the waste is non-issue.. To me, is not a
| volumetric problem, but for time ad long term safety. At
| fukushima disposing of the contaminated water is still a big
| problem now, imagine the big part of plants, and there is a
| 90km avoidence zone for many years.
|
| Make nuclear really safe maybe can be done, at witch cost?
| Will stay still in market? I doubt. Probably some nuclear
| technology will remain and can be used and developed for
| research and bootstrap, not for supply the whole.
|
| > solar and wind are just impractical toys These toys are in
| lowering cost, rising efficiency and world wide spread and
| deployment, more than any others technology, and 10 yrs. ago
| was difficult to think, now is reality, and investing
| resources on solar/wind/others will make a difference -now-,
| can be widespread, create more workplaces, where building
| more nuclear will make some effect to 10 years, and can be
| done only by few big companies (apart environment issues).
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _At fukushima disposing of the contaminated water is
| still a big problem now,_
|
| That tritium is a huge nothingburger. They could dump it
| into the ocean now or store it for a century then dump it;
| either way it causes no real harm. The amount of tritium
| they're wringing themselves into knots over is a nonissue.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Efficiency of solar and wind isn't the real issue. The
| problem is: solar only works during a day, and wind farms
| only work when there's wind. Which makes both of them
| irregular, unpredictable. It could be mitigated if we had a
| cheap mass energy storage technology, but we don't (Li-Ion
| batteries are way too expensive, and hydroelectric storage
| requires very specific conditions, it cannot be built just
| anywhere). What we need is a stable supply of energy which
| is independent of the time of day and the weather. Nuclear
| can be that.
| Dah00n wrote:
| If the storage facility is absolute safe against nature
| and current and future human stupidity and curiosity,
| yes.
| effed3 wrote:
| Yes, efficiency is not an issue, but is improving.
|
| Storage technology evolve, there are many battery
| technology, even better than li-ion if fully developed,
| and storage can be chemical, capturing co2 and making
| fuels with net zero CO2 pollution, can be thermal, can be
| even gravitational, hydrogen local storage, and energy
| can move in grids, to go where is need from where is
| available, engineering can do this now it there is a true
| will.
|
| If there is a system finely distributed (many systems)
| for production, transport and storage, in a mix on low to
| high tecnology, this will make global energy really
| available and independent of uncertains and variable
| conditions.
|
| Many examples of good offgrid appication exist, done by
| some guys, Imagine what can be done with true
| development/investment just tomorrow.
|
| And Uranium (like fossil fuels) is not everywhere, a
| shift of geopolitics will affect availability, sun and
| wind are everywhere, maybe not constant, but hardly
| vanish for long periods everywhere..
| Detrytus wrote:
| You make a lot of assumptions here, about the directions
| in which future technologies can possibly develop. The
| thing is: if we are making decisions right now, we should
| make it based on what we know for sure, not based on our
| hopes and dreams, which might never materialize. In 20
| years time, if the technologies you mention do indeed
| appear, we can re-evaluate our approach.
|
| > Uranium (like fossil fuels) is not everywhere, a shift
| of geopolitics will affect availability, sun and wind are
| everywhere, maybe not constant, but hardly vanish for
| long periods everywhere..
|
| Sun disappears for half of the day, every day. Strong
| wind is not that common at all, except in few selected
| areas, like the seaside.
| IX-103 wrote:
| I'm not sure they forget about cleanup for nuclear so much as
| it just isn't included for any power generation method.
|
| The residual ash from coal plants are called coal tailings.
| They basically contain everything in the coal that didn't burn.
| Currently this is all piled up near the coal power plant. So
| you have chemicals like mercury, arsenic, and lead, as well as
| a smattering of radioactives like uranium sitting in a pile.
| Occasionally weather washes out these "piles" and they find
| their way into streams or leach through the underlayment to hit
| the ground water. When a coal plant is decommissioned the owner
| files for bankruptcy and the pile of coal tailings becomes
| another Superfund site.
|
| Yet somehow nuclear is different. Even though if nothing is
| done, in a thousand years the coal tailings will still be just
| as toxic as today. While the radioactive waste will be near a
| background.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Decomissioning is factored into all nuclear lifecycle analyses.
| Long term waste solutions are in operation today (see WIPP) and
| expanding soon (see Onkalo).
|
| https://whataboutthewaste.com
| effed3 wrote:
| On the technical level, i think yes, there are analysis and
| solution.
|
| But at practical level (economic/politics) decommissioning is
| left to the posterity (cost rising years after years,
| shifting of milestone, more taxes.. and so on)
| karaterobot wrote:
| > and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist
|
| This is certainly wrong, unless the word "definitive" is used
| to shift the goal post such that it's effectively impossible to
| meet. Like the people who said, of Yucca Mountain, that "sure,
| it's been geologically stable for millions of years, but we
| can't definitively say there won't be an earthquake tomorrow",
| or "what if society collapses and, ten thousand years from now,
| a tribe of stone age explorers breaks into the concrete and
| reinforced steel facility buried under a mountain in the remote
| desert, and then goes 700 meters down, uses their lithic tools
| to bust down a few more steel doors, and gets irradiated? Those
| hypothetical 10-20 people in the distant future might die, thus
| we can conclude there is no definitively safe storage
| solution".
| Dah00n wrote:
| At a minimum definitive must mean from today and until we can
| _and will_ make any radioactive waste not radioactive waste
| anymore. If that requires safety against stone age explores
| or not I can 't say. History has an abundance of tales of how
| we store things safe enough and then decades (or a few years)
| later we learn that dumping thousands of barrels of
| radioactive waste in the ocean was stupid, that slapping some
| concrete on top of a nuclear bomb test site didn't really
| contain it, that mixing chemical waste with earth and letting
| it sit near a river was pretty stupid, etc. etc.
|
| Definitive means it is 100% certain this is not happening
| with any radioactive waste as there's no lower limit where
| radiation isn't dangerous. "Definitely safe against human
| stupidity and error" seems fine to me for radioactive waste
| when there's zero need to produce any. Again, is that
| timescale up until stone age man in the future? I can't say
| but the producers of radioactive waste need to know the
| answer before they can built a storage facility or they'll
| have to make it safe enough for anything less than the earth
| going pooof.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| >until we can and will make any radioactive waste not
| radioactive waste anymore
|
| Nature does that for us. It's why burying is a perfectly
| acceptable means of disposal.
| effed3 wrote:
| we dont have a time machine, so seems to me the right aproach
| to search for maximum safety, not a relative one.
|
| No definitive solution exist even for plastic/polymers, there
| substances discarded are spreading the world, and the effect
| are still unclear.
| mkl95 wrote:
| > Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of
| people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to
| that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most
| daunting challenges of the 21st century
|
| A daunting challenge, but that on paper "only" requires a few
| thousand nuclear plants. The actual challenges have to do with
| humans - many of those countries are unstable or are at war, and
| cannot do things that are way simpler than building a bunch of
| nuclear plants. Not to mention even among developed countries
| there is an irrational fear of that technology.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| original title is in quotes
| Julesman wrote:
| Absolutely false premise from the first sentence. It is NOT
| possible for the world to live like the first world did in the
| 20th century. And nuclear energy is an apocalypically short-sited
| solution, mostly favored by the current energy industry for
| maintaining the current model of distribution.
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