[HN Gopher] Unplanned exposure during diving in the spent nuclea...
___________________________________________________________________
Unplanned exposure during diving in the spent nuclear fuel pool
(2011)
Author : marcodiego
Score : 73 points
Date : 2024-09-25 13:01 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (isoe-network.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (isoe-network.net)
| Mindless2112 wrote:
| You might say it was NSFW.
| queuebert wrote:
| _OSHA has entered the chat._
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| *2010/2011.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| Here's a Wayback mirror since the server appears to be
| struggling:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20240402165313/https://isoe-netwo...
|
| Edit: While the above link works for me, this link might work
| better for some:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20240402165313if_/https://isoe-ne...
| bamboozled wrote:
| It just displays an image c
| xattt wrote:
| Wayback link seems to only show the first slide without an
| option to move forward.
| max-ibel wrote:
| That's a pretty good post-mortem report. I hope they have
| implemented all the proposed process changes.
| staplung wrote:
| I think this is the incident referenced in WhatIf's exploration
| of how long you could swim in a nuclear reactor's spent fuel
| pool.
|
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
| atomic128 wrote:
| Piece of a fission reactor became radioactive due to neutron
| bombardment.
|
| Lost track of this radioactive piece in the pool, found it by
| accident, zap!
|
| Neutrons make hardware radioactive.
|
| Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission)
| reactors. These fusion (not fission) reactors will be an intense
| source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion (not
| fission) reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the
| gamma rays.
|
| If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use
| fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know
| how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can
| provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.
|
| Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and
| basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but
| it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate
| heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks
| next to each other and they get hot'."
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Butt _whaddabbaut_
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion ?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I assume you're joking, but for others who might not realise:
| aneutronic fusion is _mostly_ aneutronic, not entirely. Some
| neutrons are still released, and the reactor walls will still
| become radioactive over time, just slower.
|
| Oh, and also, the fuel types that do produce a usefully lower
| level of neutron radiation are absurdly hard to get to fuse.
| We're talking 100x harder than the "easy" D-T fusion... which
| in turn is five decades of technology development away from
| producing useful amounts of power.
|
| Aneutronic fusion reactors will be used on interstellar
| craft... in the 2100s.
|
| See the "residual radiation" section in the same article: htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Residual_rad...
| fragmede wrote:
| Fission radioactivity is the bad stuff that will be radioactive
| for millions of years and we don't know how deal with that. It
| needs heavy metals like plutonium and uranium and when it goes
| wrong, they melt down and we all have a bad time. Fusion uses
| tritium and can be made from seawater and makes helium, and
| doesn't melt down in the same way, and the waste is relatively
| short lived.
| atomic128 wrote:
| See discussion of dry cask storage here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601833
| pfdietz wrote:
| Dry cask storage is simple, relatively cheap, and
| forecloses no future option for dealing with waste. By the
| time the waste is so cooled off it is no longer self
| protecting from amateur diversion of plutonium -- maybe 300
| years -- options should be greatly expanded for its
| disposal, including shooting it into space on dirt cheap
| extremely reliable launchers.
|
| In any case, setting the fuel disposal cost to zero still
| leaves fission uncompetitive, given the cost of building
| new nuclear power plants. This is especially the case if
| one imagines a nuclear powered world economy, which likely
| would have to resort to some flavor of breeder reactors.
| Reprocessing would be necessary for breeders, but that
| wouldn't make breeders cheaper than current burner
| reactors.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Fission radioactivity is the bad stuff that will be
| radioactive for millions of years and we don't know how deal
| with that.
|
| We also don't know how to deal with lead and it will be
| poisonous until we figure out how to biologically re-engineer
| the human species. So far so good, we still use lead, you can
| buy the stuff by the kilo. This is a minor problem to the
| point where the people bringing it up aren't taking the
| situation seriously. The volumes are tiny and we can just
| dump it somewhere.
| alex_young wrote:
| Around 2000 metric tons of nuclear waste are produced every
| year in the US. And that represents under 20% of
| electricity production.
|
| I do think there are ways to manage the problem, but tiny
| isn't the word I'd use.
| roenxi wrote:
| 2000 metric tons! Wow! Look out, we're dealing with the
| big numbers there! Nearly up to 5 figures assuming we
| round it wrong.
|
| That is around 3 shipping containers. There is literally
| a risk of losing it in transit because the volume is so
| small. If you see 3 shipping containers in a field
| somewhere that might be a year's worth of nuclear waste.
|
| It is hard to get across how small that number is
| compared to 20% of the US's annual electricity
| production. The reason the problem hasn't been "solved"
| in the last however long reactors have been a thing is it
| is too small a problem to devote time to.
| texuf wrote:
| Except you can't transport it. We built a giant cave for
| it in the desert and everybody agreed that the material
| was too dangerous to drive past people's homes so we just
| leave it sitting around on site hoping a natural disaster
| doesn't wash it away. I'm pro nuclear but we need to be
| honest with ourselves.
| roenxi wrote:
| I mean yeah. They do leave it sitting around on site.
| Because it takes up no space, they can build a bunker to
| store it without adding all that much to the cost and
| there are idiots hyperventilating at the thought of
| transporting dangerous goods around. I'd imagine the
| nuclear people decided it wasn't worth the hassle.
|
| I feel ridiculous having to argue that volumes of
| material this small represent a real threat. If you
| wanted to move it we could. Split it up into little loads
| and put it in a stupidly over-engineered shielded truck.
| Goodness me this is _not a real problem_. They 've been
| ignoring it for decades and the consequences are
| somewhere between nil and nothing interesting. There is
| nothing here to be honest about, there is no reasonable
| threat to debate. We transport explosives, we transport
| poison, we sometimes get massive port explosions that can
| level a district. Then we've got old mate claiming 2,000
| metric tonnes of a relatively dangerous material
| represents a serious national problem. The absurdity of
| that is frustrating to deal with.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Yes, the powers that be have ignored the issue of nuclear
| materials sitting on site at power plants for decades,
| I'm not sure it's a good idea to make 5 or 10 times more
| of the stuff at other sites and trust that the actual
| knowledgeable experts, who haven't done shit for decades,
| will figure out a solution by the time it's bigger issue.
|
| We should decrease our power usage as a whole planet, and
| reduce dependence on technology that has outsized
| biological risks, like nuclear and plastics, rather than
| rushing into some future that will only enrich the
| already wealthy.
| alwa wrote:
| Why? Using power meaningfully improves people's lives,
| and many billions of people are still on the end of the
| spectrum where "improving lives" involves improvements
| like "not starving" and "having safe water".
|
| The benefits of making power available are extremely (!)
| robust and well-understood, as are the health and safety
| benefits of switching from combustion-based power to non-
| combustion-based power.
|
| I have yet to hear skeptics raise specific nuclear
| concerns that are real, consequential, and also
| unmanaged. For all its cost and red tape, the past 60
| years' regulatory posture of "you must identify and
| mitigate every risk to the absolute maximum degree
| physically possible, damn the cost" seems to have
| resulted in a system where, well... they have.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Using power meaningfully, sure, but Bitcoin and AI are
| not meaningful. Using power to make steel or to use tools
| to make lives easier IS meaningful.
|
| Red tape in nuclear is there for a reason. I don't trust
| anyone to do nuclear without tons of red tape. The only
| reason it's safe is the red tape. Take red tape away from
| industries that aren't inherently unsafe, fine, but not
| nuclear power.
| pfdietz wrote:
| We should greatly increase our power usage as a whole
| planet, to improve the quality of life for humanity. Much
| of humanity is energy starved.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Don't go talking about "humanity" needing power, all of
| the power being built is so the developed countries can
| write books with LLMs and other stupid shit.
|
| Humanity might need more power some places, but it's
| uneven and that probably won't change. Your argument is
| moral and right, but the capitalists that choose where
| power go will continue to put power plants next to where
| their interests lie.
|
| Developed nations need to reduce power usage so that
| others who are poor may have power. That is my stance, I
| don't care how unpopular.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I want you to consider how much energy would be needed to
| bring the rest of the world up to a US, or even European,
| standard of living. This would utterly dwarf energy going
| into LLMs.
|
| You seem to have this silly idea that LLMs are consuming
| huge amounts of energy.
| richk449 wrote:
| Nuclear waste is transported regularly:
|
| https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-transp.html
| chickenbig wrote:
| > everybody agreed that the material was too dangerous to
| drive past people's homes
|
| Everyone? A vocal group of activists, perhaps.
|
| The same could be said for transport of chemicals by
| rail; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,
| _train_de... and still that goes on.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Shipping containers seem to have a maximum weight of
| about 20 tonnes so surely around 100 containers?
| oefrha wrote:
| Nuclear waste has a density of ~10g/cm^3, so 2000t is
| about 200m^3. Standard 40' container has a volume of
| 59.3m^3, so it's indeed about 3 to 4 by volume. Of course
| you shouldn't pack a container full of something so dense
| when shipping. Anyway it's a pretty tiny amount of
| storage space; single family homes are usually larger by
| volume.
| carlmr wrote:
| The more important consideration is we're wasting the
| waste. It still contains 90% of the fissile energy and
| we're calling it waste:
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-
| spent-....
| laurencerowe wrote:
| The problem with nuclear reprocessing is that it creates
| more nuclear waste as a byproduct so it only really makes
| sense when you want to make nuclear weapons.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That figure is correct only if you consider the energy
| content of the U-238 in the fuel. But reprocessing fuel
| to recover U-238 is idiotic: we have loads of U-238 in
| enrichment plant waste streams, and the material is so
| cheap they use it as ballast weights in sailboats.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| That is just the high level nuclear waste (the spent
| control rods) which needs to be kept in cooling pools for
| about a decade before being transferred to dry cask
| storage. That definitely takes up a lot more space.
|
| > Dry cask storage is a method of storing high-level
| radioactive waste, such as spent nuclear fuel that has
| already been cooled in a spent fuel pool for at least one
| year and often as much as ten years. Casks are typically
| steel cylinders that are either welded or bolted closed.
| The fuel rods inside are surrounded by inert gas.
| Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight
| containment of the spent fuel. Each cylinder is
| surrounded by additional steel, concrete, or other
| material to provide radiation shielding to workers and
| members of the public.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage
|
| There's also a lot of low level nuclear waste which is a
| pain to deal with (make sure you pick the right brand of
| kitty litter...)
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2015/03/26/395615637...
| roenxi wrote:
| It'd be volume limited, as the other comment points out
| Uranium is pretty dense.
|
| I would certainly agree that nobody should actually try
| to put a year's generation of dangerous nuclear waste in
| 3 shipping containers. It'd be hazardous and the shipping
| containers couldn't be moved without breaking (probably
| do some damage to them even without moving them). The
| point is more that we're dealing with a volume of
| material that is - for an industrial society - tiny.
| There is a reason that in practice it is ignored it
| despite the braying crowd of people insisting that it is
| an unsolved problem that we can't ignore. It is an
| extremely ignoreable problem on the scale of benefits
| that nuclear power provides.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| I mostly agree but we should understand that the costs of
| dealing with the waste are not negligible. I'm pretty
| agnostic about nuclear power. I used to believe it was
| necessary but renewables and batteries now seem the more
| cost effective and a far faster way to reach 90% carbon
| free electricity.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Radioactive materials needs to be physically protected,
| shielded against radiation, and have active cooling
| system or be small enough to have passive cooling.
|
| You may dedicate whole container to transport just a few
| kg of highly radioactive items.
| adrianN wrote:
| You don't have to protect lead from terrorists trying to
| build a dirty bomb. The radio nuclides you find in nuclear
| waste are also a lot more poisonous than lead, even if you
| ignore the radiation.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| You can build a dirty bomb from the activated wastes of a
| fusion plant though so the original point stand still.
|
| Also, there are many things much more poisonous than
| radionuclide you can use to make terror weapons that are
| easy to get (take ricin, for instance)
| chickenbig wrote:
| > there are many things much more poisonous than
| radionuclide you can use to make terror weapons
|
| I guess that the effectiveness of terror weapons has
| nothing to do with how many people are directly harmed.
|
| > You can build a dirty bomb from the activated wastes of
| a fusion plant though so the original point stand still.
|
| Even simpler would be to find a radioactive source
| (medical, irradiation, industrial radiography). Small
| quantities, in a portable package, but geiger detectors
| would definitely be able to detect the fallout.
| adrianN wrote:
| That is of course true, but I don't think fusion will
| ever be economical.
| boringg wrote:
| I find it funny that you speak about nuclear energy yet you
| validate it based on a quote from an exceptional game designer.
| This isn't a knock on Carmack but more like you should probably
| hunt for someone in discipline, there are many.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| generalists are underrated nowadays it seems, compared to
| most of scientific history where they very clearly exist and
| can make contributions across a ton of "disciplines"
| edem wrote:
| Carmack is not a game designer (never was in fact). Carmack
| is a God. Also, jist because what you think he is doesn't
| mean that he is not right.
| junon wrote:
| Let's not normalize placing people who do cool things on
| unnecessarily large pedestals. Idolization like that never
| has a good outcome.
| navjack27 wrote:
| I'm sorry people didn't understand the tone of voice of
| your post. I did though.
| navjack27 wrote:
| He made a rocket company. I would think as a generalist he
| knows a thing or two about energy production at least for
| thrust and propulsion if not more.
|
| I don't think he would even call himself a game designer.
| He's a programmer and engine builder and rocket scientist and
| overall deep general nerd.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just
| use fission?_
|
| Fundamentally: fission fuels are limited, _particularly_
| uranium. If humans were to run _current_ energy demands 100% on
| uranium-based nuclear power, we 'd burn through reserves in
| about two decades.[1]
|
| Breeder reactors and thorium fusion change that calculus, as
| might viable uranium recovery from seawater. (Uranium, unlike
| thorium, dissolves in seawater, though the quantities of water
| which would have to be processed would be absolutely immense
| and nontrivial on multiple grounds.)
|
| _Fusion_ is based on hydrogen and a few other light elements,
| which are vastly more prevalent, most notably as water found on
| Earth (and elsewhere in the solar system should we use so much
| hydrogen that net water prevalence is affected).
|
| The slight hitch in the scheme is that whilst fission is so
| simple an untrained janitor can achieve it,[2] or even plain
| old dumb rocks,[3] fusion turns out to be fiendishly difficult
| on Earth / at terrestrial conditions.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. Based on a 200 year supply at ~10% of total energy supply
| presently, which scales to ~20 years at 100%:
| <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-
| glo...>.
|
| 2. For example: Oak Ridge prodcedures / Feyman (~1945)
| <https://robertlovespi.net/2014/09/07/how-richard-feynman-
| sav...>, Cecil Kelley (1958) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cec
| il_Kelley_criticality_accid...>, Y-12 plant (1958) <https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-12_National_Security_Complex...>, Vinca
| Nuclear Institute (1958) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%
| 8Da_Nuclear_Institute#1...>, Wood River Junction (1964) <https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_River_Junction,_Rhode_Isl...>,
| Mayak (1968) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak#1968_Critical
| ity_Inciden...>, and Tokaimura (1997)
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents>
| being just a few. Wikipedia has a more comprehensive listing: <
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_inc...
| >. My point isn't that the perpetrators were necessarily
| janitors, or untrained (though some effectively were), but that
| criticality was achieved entirely unintentionally. Accidental
| fusion criticality incidents are far less frequent.
|
| 3. "Natural fission reactors" are a thing: <https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...>. To be fair, so
| are natural fusion reactors, though few have yet been
| discovered on Earth: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star>.
| scottshamus wrote:
| I was curious about your point that we only have ~20 years
| supply. The article you linked doesn't really defend that
| estimate, I think it's actually pointing out that's the
| absolute floor of our supply.
|
| It mentions estimates of undiscovered uranium and also
| multiple pathways to extend that estimate if there was demand
| to improve the technology or increase our supply. It sounds
| like realistically we could find the material for powering
| all of our energy using fission if we had the demand to do
| so.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| If you want to speculate wildly on maybes then it's also
| hard to argue that hydrogen is fundamentally one of the
| most common elements in _the entire universe_ and it's not
| particularly controversial to say that a high tech future
| society would probably want to use that rather than the
| _vastly less abundant_ heavier elements.
|
| > It sounds like realistically we could find the material
| for powering all of our energy using fission
|
| For _a while_
|
| > if we had the demand to do so.
|
| Maybe two decades isn't spot on, but come on, you're
| _really_ grasping at straws.
|
| It's _fundamentally less abundant_.
|
| 20 years? 50 years? 100 years.
|
| Sooner or later you're going to run out, and not on
| geological timescales.
|
| Tell me it ain't so?
|
| There are reasons to prefer fission, but "we have plenty of
| uranium" isn't one of them.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The resource size is one I've seen many times in many
| places, and it seems widely accepted. The linked article
| isn't the best source, but it's characteristics of others
| I've encountered over the years.
|
| The general point is that uranium _ore_ is not especially
| abundant, and tends to be highly localised, which suggests
| a reprise of petroleum-induced geopolitics.
|
| (Uranium in seawater is far more prevalent, but quite
| difficult and expensive to access.)
|
| I'm also familiar with the long and tedious discussion of
| just what "resources" and "reserves" constitute. I'd
| suggest briefly that much of that discussion fails to
| reflect that the true benefit of energy resources is the
| surplus EROEI (energy return on energy input) which results
| from their use, and that whilst it's often possible to
| increase the total resource _quantity_ that comes with a
| corresponding decrease in resource _quality_ in the sense
| of a far lower EROEI.
|
| Early petroleum finds featured EROEI of 200:1 or greater.
| That is, 1 unit of energy invested returned 200 units
| returned. Present finds are closer to 10:1 to 20:1. I'm not
| as versed on uranium, though I'm finding indications that
| current ore-based finds are ~10:1 to 60:1. Seawater
| extraction is all but certainly far lower than that.
| Generally I'm somewhat suspicious of casual claims that we
| could vastly increase our uranium supply.
|
| Thorium's a somewhat different animal (or mineral,
| definitely not vegetable) in that it's 3--4 times more
| abundant than uranium, and if I recall correctly can be
| "bred" into fissionable forms more readily. Non-thorium
| breeder reactors rely on a plutonium cycle, which
| introduces numerous other concerns (weapons, terrorism,
| etc.).
|
| Moreover, _liquid hydrocarbon is fantastically useful
| stuff_ and can be stored, transported, and utilised with
| immense flexibility and (comparative) safety. Nuclear
| energy must be converted to other forms, at considerable
| loss, to be utilised. Grid mains current is useful, but
| nuclear power plant output isn 't especially flexible, and
| transition to storable forms comes at high costs, limited
| capacity, or high conversion losses (e.g., synfuel
| production). Hydrocarbon-powered automobiles, lorries,
| aircraft, construction equipment, hand tools, portable
| generators, etc., are all readily produced and utilised.
| Their nuclear variants not so much.
|
| (I'm specifying _hydrocarbons_ rather than _petroleum_ to
| note that it 's the chemical constitution rather than the
| origin or creation process which is significant here. I'm
| something of a fan of hydrocarbon fuels, somewhat less so
| of fossil fuels, despite their past utility.)
| Level_II_BASIC wrote:
| D
| fdfgyu wrote:
| There's radioactive and there's radioactive.
|
| With a neutron source we can control what the isotopes will be
| by choosing the appropriate metals for construction.
|
| In fission you get, more or less, all the isotopes you can.
| fission doesn't split U235 into the same parts every time - its
| a random process and broad distribution of daughter fission
| isotopes are produced.
|
| But I still agree. We should go with breeder reactors and call
| it a day
| minetest2048 wrote:
| > If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just
| use fission?
|
| One of the reasons is that we can make nuclear bombs out of it.
| People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and
| unlimited fission energy, so everything that might be used to
| make nukes are insanely regulated. This have downstream effects
| that make nuclear fission hard and expensive:
|
| - With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal
| security. With nuclear fusion power plants, stealing a big
| tokamak wall to make dirty bomb is hard, so you can still use
| normal security. With fission power plants you need special
| armed security
|
| - You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you
| don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes. This affects
| the nuclear power plant design, as you don't want to have any
| blind spot where the operator can smuggle the nuclear material
| away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HHMAht3gSg
|
| - Some countries ban nuclear waste reprocessing because they
| don't want someone using the plutonium from reprocessing
| process to make nukes. This is really sad as they're throwing
| all the good fuel away from the waste. Similar story with
| breeder reactors
|
| With meltdown risk at least its solvable by safer reactor
| design, but there's no way we can remove those expensive
| safeguards.
| chickenbig wrote:
| > One of the reasons is that we can make nuclear bombs out of
| it.
|
| Are you talking about a dirty bomb? Spent nuclear fuel from
| PWR/BWR do not contain the right isotopes of Plutonium.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium
|
| > People currently value not getting nuked more than clean
| and unlimited fission energy
|
| This looks like a false-choice. A choice between the presence
| of nuclear weapons vs unlimited fission energy might be
| slightly fairer, but many countries have a civil nuclear
| program without nuclear weapons.
|
| > With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal
| security
|
| Non-"normal security" is not a great cost for a nuclear power
| station (1+ GW). 50 extra staff might be 5M USD a year extra,
| so 0.60 USD/MWh more. Scaling to more reactors per site would
| give economies of scale.
|
| > You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that
| you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes.
|
| Accountability is good; tracking where each fuel bundle is
| and goes is fairly standard practice (at least nowadays), no?
| Audits don't have to be a pain if their requirements mesh
| with the business processes.
|
| > This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel
| away from the waste.
|
| The Plutonium is good stuff for breeder reactors. The
| depleted Uranium bulk is less useful, as we have thousands of
| tonnes already sitting around. Perhaps the most interesting
| aspect of reprocessing is the extraction and vitrification of
| fission products. Less bulk, splitting the higher activity
| products out of the bulk, reducing the storage requirements.
|
| > there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards
|
| Rules can be changed. De-escalation is possible!
| pfdietz wrote:
| One can make nuclear bombs using fusion as well.
|
| Consider Helion's design. This reactor will produce copious
| excess neutrons and tritium from DD fusion. A single 50 MW
| (average) Helion reactor would produce enough neutrons in a
| year to make half a ton of plutonium in a fission-suppressed
| blanket. It would also produce more than enough tritium to
| enable all the bombs made from the plutonium to be boosted.
| And this is a single, rather small fusion reactor!
|
| Cheap neutrons would be a proliferation nightmare.
| rkharsan64 wrote:
| Modern Thermonuclear bombs (also called Hydrogen bombs) work
| on fusion. The only reason why they use fission is to trigger
| a fusion reaction.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
| pfdietz wrote:
| The question really isn't "why not use fission", it's "why
| should fusion not be more expensive than fission"? Since
| fission is losing because it's too expensive, any other
| advantage of fusion over fission means little if it's even more
| expensive.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive:
| it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's
| probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe
| younger generations. Fusion is kind of unknown to the larger
| public and is still described as the magical unlimited power
| source and safe alternative to fission, so it still has a
| chance.
| pfdietz wrote:
| No, it's because it's too expensive. The idea that fission
| is losing because of wrongthink is a comforting tale told
| by nuclear fans.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| Comfort tale or not, my country banned it completely 40
| years ago by popular referendum. I don't think the
| economics were what people had in mind one year after the
| Chernobyl disaster.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Correlation is not causation. You would need to show that
| in the absence of that ban, nuclear would have been
| successful.
|
| The "nuclear would have worked except for the meddling
| kids" theory needs to explain why all sorts of other
| destructive technologies plow right along, even in the
| face of massive campaigns against them. The
| distinguishing feature is those technologies are economic
| winners. Large profit flows trump activism. Unprofitable
| technologies don't have the stakeholders who would defend
| them.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| It's pointless arguing whether it could have been
| economically successful, we'll largely never know because
| people got scared.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's also pointless then to make a claim that (as you
| state) cannot be demonstrated. Airy unjustifiable
| nothing.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| > pfdietz: It's also pointless then to make a claim that
| (as you state) cannot be demonstrated. Airy unjustifiable
| nothing.
|
| I said my country effectively banned nuclear power with a
| popular referendum that was completely biased by the
| aftermath of Chernobyl [1], economics hardly played any
| role in it. This is a fact. Similar referenda were also
| held (or tried to be held) in other countries like
| Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia, and if you look you'll
| find the concerns were not economical, but about the
| safety and waste management.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_Italian_referendums
| pfdietz wrote:
| The unjustifiable part is the connection of this ban to
| any consequence. The assumption you try to pass off
| without justification is that without the ban, nuclear
| would have triumphed. But then you admitted this
| conclusion cannot be justified.
|
| So, your pointing to the ban is just dishonestly trying
| to connect the dots without actually connecting any dots.
|
| Me, I think the raw cost figures speak for themselves.
| Even if nuclear had not been banned, it would have
| failed, although perhaps lots of money would have been
| wasted trying to maintain the pretense it wasn't a
| failure.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| > The assumption you try to pass off without
| justification is that without the ban, nuclear would have
| triumphed
|
| I never said that, I said I think economics have little
| to do with the downfall of nuclear power. At least in
| most european countries, nuclear was banned or phased out
| for other reasons.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You said:
|
| > I don't think fission is loosing because it's too
| expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being
| dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people
| otherwise, maybe younger generations.
|
| That is, you are claiming that the CAUSE of nuclear's
| state is the public reaction, not economics. If nuclear
| would have failed anyway, how can that "because" be
| valid?
| jaggederest wrote:
| Same but why deal with anything reactive at all? The largest
| thing in our solar system is an already running fusion reactor
| that is already beaming 1.361 KW/m^2 to the planet.
| halper wrote:
| The kilo prefix is always written with a lowercase "k": kW
| for kilowatts.
| edem wrote:
| Efficiency is the name of the game.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Because beamed energy is inefficient in many ways, including
| space used for collectors, and the damn thing is only working
| for at most half a day at any given location anyway?
|
| It's a bit of a "why invent wheels when cows already have
| legs" kind of question.
|
| (Also "why learn to do anything on your own when you have
| rich parents that provide?")
| hmcq6 wrote:
| Who cares that it's inefficient if it is orders of
| magnitude more electricity than we need?
| elcritch wrote:
| Because batteries are expensive but needed for overnight
| storage or cloudy conditions. There's also the amount of
| land and materials needed to produce solar devices.
|
| It's ultimately more about unit cost of power than total
| available power.
| hmcq6 wrote:
| Can we not build solar panels in the ocean like we do
| with wind turbines?
|
| "Because batteries are expensive"
|
| Are they? It would only take 4000 copies of the Moss
| Landing Energy Storage Facility to store all the
| electricity we currently use in a day.
|
| Some back of the napkin math says it would cost $2
| Trillion, which is only double the amout we subsidized
| the fuel industry last year
| funOtter wrote:
| Where did this happen at?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Based on slide captions, "Kernkraftwerk Leibstadt", a/k/a
| Leibstadt Nuclear Power Plant, in Germany:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibstadt_Nuclear_Power_Plant>
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Near Germany, but, it's in Switzerland.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Gah! Too late to edit, but thanks.
| fy20 wrote:
| One interesting fact about nuclear energy I came across the other
| day is at both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, other reactors on
| the site continued to operate - and produce electricity - for
| many years after the incidents.
|
| In Russia today - just outside St Petersburg, a stones throw from
| Finland and Estonia - they still operate reactors of the same
| design as Chernobyl (with retrofits) and don't plan to shut them
| down for at least another decade.
| SunlitCat wrote:
| Well, at least they now know what better not to do and what to
| watch out for, no?
| oneshtein wrote:
| Yes, this is the problem with any kind of nuclear reactors:
| cost of upgrade is too big, so it's cheaper to risk life on a
| continent than to fix a reactor.
| chickenbig wrote:
| > cost of upgrade is too big
|
| Are you sure the other reactors were not upgraded, the
| procedures were not updated, the operators were not better
| trained?
|
| > cheaper to risk life on a continent than to fix a reactor
|
| Considering the reactor operators didn't work from home it
| suggests there was not a great risk in living on a continent
| with these reactors. Plus why stop at "on a continent" ...
| this is one world, no planet B etc.
| oneshtein wrote:
| You assume that nuclear stations are in a world without
| wars, isn't?
|
| In real world, one nuclear country invaded another nuclear
| country, shelled and then captured two nuclear stations,
| and use one of them as shelter for soldiers and as ammo
| depot, while openly claims that they will bomb other
| nuclear stations in month or two.
|
| If a experienced operator of a nuclear station will want to
| make harm to another nation, can it use a RBMK-1000 type
| reactor to repeat Chornobyl? It's not a theoretical
| question any more, because Russians forcefully migrate
| operators from Ukrainian nuclear station to RF stations and
| from RF to Ukrainian station.
| chickenbig wrote:
| > Yes, this is the problem with any kind of nuclear
| reactors: cost of upgrade is too big, so it's cheaper to
| risk life on a continent than to fix a reactor. > You
| assume that nuclear stations are in a world without wars
|
| I was commenting on a statement you made about the cost
| of upgrade. Somehow you've found a linkage (or absence of
| a linkage) to war in your response.
|
| > In real world, one nuclear country invaded another
| nuclear country
|
| Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons it inherited from the
| Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_w
| eapons_of_mass_de...
|
| > can it use a RBMK-1000 type reactor to repeat
| Chornobyl?
|
| The captured power stations are not of this kind; they
| are all VVER. There is also the small matter of Ukraine
| wanting to build more nuclear power stations.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| The other RBMK reactors were indeed upgraded after the
| Chernobyl disaster (and two were built afterwards to improved
| standards).
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Related and easily explained: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
| lokimedes wrote:
| I have great respect for the safety culture that IAEA has
| mandated. These accident reports always contain great learnings.
| Yet, it is so easy for non-experts (and experts forgetting that
| risks and rewards are connected) to misread this as conclusive
| evidence og the universal dangers of nuclear. That a relatively
| simple human error, with little consequence, is treated like a
| flight crash signals disproportionately to the public that
| nuclear isn't worth the risk.
| rurban wrote:
| This incident in 2010: https://www.ensi.ch/de/2010/08/31/kkl-
| ueberschreitung-der-zu...
|
| Worker touches something he shouldn't. Unlike in Los Alamos he
| survived though, and didn't loose his hand. With higher voltages
| such incidents are usually deadly, that's why we were explicitly
| trained to NOT touch anything, and put our hands behind our back.
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