[HN Gopher] Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nucle...
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Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel
Author : rbanffy
Score : 84 points
Date : 2024-10-07 13:01 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| baq wrote:
| > "With the goal of completing the decommissioning in 30 to 40
| years [...]"
|
| Can't decide if it's a success of nuclear or a failure. Leaning
| towards success:
|
| - ~900 tons of super duper radioactive material is more or less
| safely sitting in steel enclosures
|
| - we're (as a global civilization) slowly but surely figuring out
| how to move the hazardous waste to a safer storage, and it may
| _only_ (ahem) take a couple generations
|
| - OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it all
| away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals to
| the environment...?
| Krasnol wrote:
| Sound more like a success for the anti-nuclear movement.
| baq wrote:
| The anti-nuclear movement succeeded in Germany and they're
| reaping the crops now. Nobody will go back to 1800s quality
| of life willingly if they can help it, be it by burning coal,
| trash, plastics, tires or paint cans for heat or electricity.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Oh, sure they are reaping.
|
| 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable
| sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years
| ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely.
|
| The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated
| on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble
| simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and
| environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible
| innovation in nuclear and saving the environment 2024 means
| acting fast. Nothing about nuclear is fast.
|
| [2] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-
| de/aktuelles/ausbau-erne...
|
| PS. because it automatically comes up: no, Germany could
| not phase out coal before nuclear because there are much
| more jobs connected to coal and no politician would survive
| such a fast exit. How important it is, can be seen from the
| name of the commission tasked with the coal phase out: http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
| Scarblac wrote:
| 61.5% sounds like a lot, but how much electricity is
| needed to replace everything that fossil fuel is now used
| for? I think it needs to increase to 400% or so to do
| that.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| We don't need to replace primary energy with electric
| energy in a 1:1 ratio.
|
| An ICE car is 20-30% efficient, an EV is 90% efficient.
| Generally we are looking at a grid expansion, but it is
| not massive.
|
| See this amazing chart on rejected vs. useful energy:
|
| https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _61.5% of Germany 's electricity comes from renewable
| sources_
|
| Now. For years they switched to coal. Even today, Germany
| falls to the siren songs of the gas lobby, who promise a
| EUR1.5tn investment into gas infrastructure will be
| happily written off for the sake of the planet.
| Krasnol wrote:
| FYI: In Germany the same companies who have nuclear
| reactors, have coal, gas and renewables. They do not
| lobby against themselves. Therefore, your "lobby" phrases
| do not work for Germany. You should stop repeating that.
| It only shows that you have not sufficient knowledge to
| participate in this discussion.
| TheGamerUncle wrote:
| ok but lol you are still obviously denying and acting
| blind to the fact that for many many years, that neither
| we will nor our lungs will get back, coal had to be
| ramped up and overused in Germany, Nuclear is safe and
| effective and until we actually solve the battery problem
| most of the world should switch to nuclear if we want to
| survive, Yale has tried to fit the numbers on many
| occasions but not even them can disagree that nuclear is
| required
| locallost wrote:
| > ok but lol you are still obviously denying and acting
| blind to the fact that for many many years, that neither
| we will nor our lungs will get back, coal had to be
| ramped up and overused in Germany
|
| This simply isn't true. Coal use for electricity has been
| declining consistently in Germany and especially since
| the first shutdowns of nuclear plants (cca 2011). And the
| replacement was not natural gas as in e.g. the US.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Well then it sounds like they are progressing in the
| right direction. If in the future you get to a point
| where 80% of all energy is renewable and 20% are peaker
| plants that's a pretty good place to be in. I'm all for
| nuclear but a 1 in a 1000 year event causing a nuclear
| spill, say by the Danube, that makes multiple countries
| unlivable is a pretty scary proposition. That being said,
| I have no idea what the state of the art is when it comes
| to nuclear power plants so maybe plants are very, very
| safe now.
| legulere wrote:
| Nuclear was replaced by renewables, not by coal: https://
| commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschla... h
| ttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_genera
| ti...
|
| A point you certainly can argue about, is that coal
| should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear,
| but that discussion is over now.
|
| For gas use electricity production is just a minor use.
| Most gas is consumed by industry and for heating
| purposes. Not enough happened in Germany in the last
| years electrifying them.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _coal should have been replaced by renewables before
| nuclear, but that discussion is over now_
|
| Right. Coal stayed online where it would have otherwise
| gone away. That was true for close to a decade.
|
| > _gas use electricity production is just a minor_
|
| And growing. Look at your own chart. The _change_ in
| natural gas electrical generation is about as large as
| solar's entire controbution.
| haconBagrid wrote:
| And here we can see how their electricity generation has
| fallen
|
| https://energy-
| charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| And in France:
|
| https://energy-
| charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR...
|
| Note that France has lost more nuclear generation than
| Germany over this period.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Where are all those rolling blackouts we've been promised
| by the fearmongering of the nuclear-astroturf? Weird eh?
|
| Maybe it's not always clever to use US-logic on the rest
| of the world.
|
| Germany is not Texas.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Texas, where new nuclear has been dead in the water for
| years.
|
| > "The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be
| investing in," says Crane. Exelon considered building two
| new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices
| were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At
| that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2
| tax of $25 per ton. "We're sitting here trading 2019 gas
| at $2.90 per MMBtu," he says; for new nuclear power to be
| competitive at that price, a CO2 tax "would be
| $300-$400." Exelon currently is placing its bets instead
| on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration
| technologies.
|
| (passage from Dec. 2018 Physics Today; Texas natural gas
| is even cheaper than that now)
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable
| sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced
| years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal
| completely.
|
| 472g of C02 per kW/h as we speak[1]. 20 times more than
| France and its nuclear.
|
| A resounding success...
|
| [1]: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
| cyberax wrote:
| > - OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it
| all away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals
| to the environment...?
|
| The reactor itself is high enough to be safe from tsunamis.
| atomic128 wrote:
| The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is
| what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy.
|
| The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay
| heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the
| most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth
| most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere.
|
| The "Great East Japan Earthquake" and its tsunami killed 19,759
| people. The earthquake was a terrible tragedy. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
|
| Meanwhile, the precious fuel remained safely entombed within
| the concrete and steel vessel that was designed to contain it.
| Without cooling, the fuel got hot ("decay heat") and melted,
| always safely enclosed within the vessel.
|
| Unfortunately, during attempts to cool the fuel in the
| aftermath of the earthquake, some radioactive fission products
| were released into the environment: caesium, iodine, xenon,
| etc. These fission products have been diluted and are harmless.
| See the section "Radionuclide release" here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
|
| How much harm did the radioactive fuel cause? Quoting
| Wikipedia: No adverse health effects among non-
| worker Fukushima residents have been documented that are
| directly attributable to radiation exposure from the
| accident, according to the United Nations Scientific
| Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
| Insurance compensation was paid for one death from lung
| cancer (4 years later), but this does not prove a causal
| relationship between radiation and the cancer. Six
| other persons have been reported as having developed
| cancer or leukemia. Two workers were hospitalized because
| of radiation burns, and several other people sustained
| physical injuries as a consequence of the accident.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
| philipkglass wrote:
| _The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of
| is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy._
|
| _This precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very
| hot ( "decay heat")._
|
| Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but
| it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long
| half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot
| primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed
| when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive
| decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of
| transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium,
| generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay
| heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until
| several decades have passed.
|
| It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper
| radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly
| radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is
| vastly higher, the heat generation complicates
| handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained
| dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In
| terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean
| cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box
| that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to
| recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it
| and start with fresh material.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The Fukushima #1 meltdown was man-made, namely the absolute
| ineptitude of the Japanese government at the time. As
| disasterous as the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami were, those were
| not what ultimately caused the meltdown.
| teamonkey wrote:
| The government was no more or less inept than any other
| organisation - government or private - anywhere in the world.
|
| When faced with pressure to save money but still deliver,
| weighed up against a very low risk of catastrophe in their
| time, they did the mental math and cut corners, found ways
| around the safeguarding policies previously put in place and
| kicked infrastructure spending down the line.
|
| The big problem with nuclear is not technological, it's
| guaranteeing that whoever is responsible for it will be
| competent, capable and solvent for hundreds of years.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| You literally do not know what transpired.
|
| When the tsunami hit and Fukushima #1 lost power and was at
| risk of meltdown, TEPCO was ready to scuttle the reactors
| by dumping seawater in them. It would have rendered the
| reactors unusable, but meltdown would be prevented.
|
| The Japanese government at the time, coming from the Prime
| Minister (Naoto Kan) himself, denied TEPCO from scuttling
| them because the government wanted the reactors usable.
| TEPCO was begging for authorization but it was not meant to
| be.
|
| So what happened was the meltdown happened and the reactors
| became unusable anyway.
|
| The blame was then scapegoated on TEPCO, because elite
| politicians surely can't and shouldn't be prosecuted for
| their ineptitude.
|
| What happened at Fukushima #1 was a human failure that did
| not have to happen.
|
| Bittersweet revenge was that the incumbent party at that
| time, the Democrat Party of Japan, lost the subsequent
| general election and the party subsequently fell apart.
| jborean93 wrote:
| How does that refute what the parent comment was saying?
| Sounds like you are agreeing that the problem is not the
| technology but the people and processes in place.
| bamboozled wrote:
| If you were a Japanese tax payer, would it be a success ?
|
| _The total cleanup costs were estimated to be between 50.5 and
| 71 trillion yen ($470 to $660 billion). For the cleanup, only
| 184.3 billion yen was reserved in the September supplementary
| budget of prefecture Fukushima, and some funds in the central
| government 's third supplementary budget of 2011._
| autoexecbat wrote:
| They don't have to pay for it all this year
| bamboozled wrote:
| Very naive comment. It's still a lot of money.
|
| Are you aware about the current economic and demographic
| situation in Japan ?
|
| It's not good here. That money could've went to a lot more
| useful things. Also remember this was a man made disaster.
| The plant was not upgraded (as recommended) to meet new
| safety guidelines, because, as if a mega tsunami would
| actually happen, right ? Then right after the event the
| operator was downplaying the extent of meltdown for too
| long. The PM had to step in and get a proper response team
| organised.
| exe34 wrote:
| > The plant was not upgraded (as recommended) to meet new
| safety guidelines, because, as if a mega tsunami would
| actually happen, right ?
|
| And others on this same thread are trying to use the same
| disaster to paint nuclear as expensive.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| And who do you think they will be paying it to?
|
| Subsidizing Japanese companies to develop technologies that
| may be exported elsewhere isn't that bad of a deal actually.
| bamboozled wrote:
| What technologies are Japanese companies developing here,
| and does the tax payer get any of that privately held
| revenue back in return?
| foxyv wrote:
| To add to your point. Disposal of nuclear waste at sea was
| common up until 1993. There is still a couple hundred thousand
| tons of such waste sitting in the ocean right now. In addition,
| about 214 times as much radioactive material was generated by
| nuclear testing than the Chernobyl breach. Fukushima wouldn't
| even come close to the waste that has already been released
| prior to the 1994 ban on Oceanic dumping.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Are the costs of this 13 years and counting expense tab added to
| the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power plants in any
| way?
|
| Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions
| are not made from overly optimistic numbers.
| kchoudhu wrote:
| Japan has (within reason) concerns other than the total cost of
| electricity: having to haul in coal, oil and LNG over an ocean
| contested by an increasingly hostile neighbor must be very
| worrying to them.
| baq wrote:
| Money is numbers in computers, joules and watts are real
| things.
|
| Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere
| near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these
| commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind
| turbines.
| pfdietz wrote:
| What are these putative externalities of wind and solar?
|
| These is a constant whataboutist argument from nuclear
| apologists, but it falls apart when examined closely, as all
| pro-nuclear power arguments do.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The fact that their system cost is prohibitive in the real
| world? The fact that we don't fucking have the slightest
| idea of how to deal with recycling that stuff on their EOL?
| Or would be the fact that mining cobalt and lithium in the
| required quantities to indulge on the fantasy of a
| solar/wind based grid would poison an inordinate portion of
| our environment? Or would it be the fact that every single
| fucking country that went all in on the siren's song of the
| renewable industry scammer is now plagued with absurdly
| high energy costs and are slipping into becoming
| impoverished third world de-industrialized economies like
| the UK and Germany?
| pfdietz wrote:
| You provide excellent examples of the bogosity of the
| arguments. Let me demolish them in turn.
|
| 1) System cost
|
| Sure, it's high. That's because we spend huge amounts of
| money on energy. ANY system to replace fossil fuels will
| be expensive, in the trillions of dollars.
|
| But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an
| even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is
| much more expensive than renewables.
|
| 2) Recycling
|
| At worst, we can bury the stuff. Recycling it _is not
| necessary_. After all, the amount of material is small
| compared to everything else we do in society, and it 's
| not some special kind of waste (like high level nuclear
| waste) that requires some particularly unique handling.
|
| 3) Lithium and cobalt
|
| Lithium is abundant. If you hadn't been paying attention,
| the price has been crashing, as it pretty much always
| does after a price spike of a mineral resource, when the
| price spike encourages investment to increase the amount
| available. As for cobalt: probably the same is true, but
| why do you think cobalt is needed?
|
| 4) poison the environment
|
| This is just emotional bullshit. No, renewables would not
| "poison the environment". You beclown yourself with this
| nonsense.
|
| 5) absurdly high energy cost
|
| As opposed to those still burning fossil fuels where they
| are foisting off the cost of the externalities on others?
| Ignoring those external costs doesn't make them go away.
|
| In any case, the place that's normally pointed to is
| Germany, where they made a large investment in renewables
| from 2009-2012. Solar was much more expensive then, and
| they are still paying that down. But the costs of
| renewables crash with time, so pointing to past
| expenditures is grossly misleading. Going forward
| renewables will be much cheaper. That's why we're seeing
| so much investment in them now globally.
|
| One can tell the intellectual barrenness of the pro-
| nuclear position when you have to resort to this sort of
| deplorable nonsense.
| akerl_ wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't
| cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
|
| > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive,
| not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
| OrigamiPastrami wrote:
| I strongly wish we had more comments like the one you're
| responding to. I find most comments here to be
| obnoxiously polite and I wish more ignorant opinions were
| publicly demolished as they should be, rather than
| continue to spread misinformation because it's the polite
| thing to do.
|
| Not all opinions are created equal.
| hollerith wrote:
| I agree.
| polotics wrote:
| Indeed you have to look at the figures, no amount of
| wordage without computation will get you a true answer,
| still calling someone or something deplorable is, I am
| sorry, a dog-whistle.
|
| So to clear the air I propose you look at this
| substantive set of answers:
|
| https://youtu.be/Z4teA8ciuRU?si=9L-_bHawmM8MI5UA (cc to
| english should work ok)
|
| https://youtu.be/s254IPHXgVA?si=FjWT5B7_Bzao0vRI
| polotics wrote:
| 1) it's not the money, it's the EROEI 2) at scale, panels
| recycling does become a very real issue 3) It's not the
| abundance, it's the mine-able ore at high enough
| concentration that matters 4) solar panels, read the docs
| please 5) again, it's the EROEI, maybe panels and wind
| scrap a 3, early oil was in the hundreds, nuclear is at
| around 50
|
| After having gotten 0/5 in terms of correctness on actual
| facts, maybe tone down the sneer?
| pfdietz wrote:
| EROEI of renewables is fine, some well-debunked garbage
| studies not withstanding.
|
| No, at scale recycling doesn't become a "real issue" in
| the sense of being a showstopper. It would be nice if it
| could save some money (recover aluminum frames, say) but
| it's only a "nice to have".
|
| "High enough concentration" is dependent on technology.
| Like other mineral resources, one can expect lithium
| extraction technology to keep ahead of demand. The doom
| and gloomers on this sort of thing are _never_ right.
| Stationary storage doesn 't even require lithium; there's
| a large variety of storage technologies that could be
| used instead (including some like pumped thermal that use
| nothing more than cheap materials like common steel.)
|
| > solar panels, read the docs please
|
| Empty nonsense. Solar panels are not toxic. Please stop
| making things up.
|
| > again, it's the EROEI, maybe panels and wind scrap a 3
|
| Completely wrong.
| Filligree wrote:
| On the other hand, the existence of coal power proves that
| releasing small amounts of radiation is fine, really. So we
| should be able to build a lot more nuclear power plants; it
| would take a lot of accidents like these to match the
| releases from coal.
| fsh wrote:
| The explosion of Chernobyl released a few thousand PBq of
| activity. Coal contains a few tens to a few hundreds of
| Bq/kg. You would have to burn something like 50 times the
| world coal reserves (and make sure not to use any exhaust
| filters) in order to match the radiation release of
| Chernobyl.
| jajko wrote:
| While I like nuclear on the paper and its theoretical env
| impact, this one is hard to ignore. Add costs of current
| projects which became ridiculous in reality. Plus as we
| see with various wars nuclear powerplants would be a
| prime target for terrorists or even state actors, they
| are certainly not considered as excluded from wars, in
| contrary.
|
| If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0
| reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere,
| apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we
| were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of
| renewables technology maturity and its spread.
| polotics wrote:
| Do pray tell calculate a world's energy system looping
| back while running purely on renewables, with electric
| powered mining, transport of ores, refining, panels
| production... You will find that you cannot, cheap (for
| now) fossil fuels are subsidising solar panels and wind
| farms massively.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The mining for renewables would be a small fraction of
| the mining for industrial society as a whole.
|
| So, if electrification cannot be done on this, industrial
| society as we know it is doomed, and nuclear cannot save
| it. Unless you're thinking we're going to have nuclear
| reactors in our mining vehicles...
| polotics wrote:
| Chernobyl with its totally mad graphite design is not
| representative of safe designs like Fukushima, or French
| plants, or even Chinese plants...
| chasil wrote:
| Are there safer plants still, that focus on eliminating
| the daughter nuclei?
|
| I understood that one benefit of molten salt reactors is
| that the fission products were easier to process or burn.
|
| Edit: "MSRs enable cheaper closed nuclear fuel cycles,
| because they can operate with slow neutrons. Closed fuel
| cycles can reduce environmental impacts: chemical
| separation turns long-lived actinides into reactor fuel.
| Discharged wastes are mostly fission products with
| shorter half-lives. This can reduce the needed
| containment to 300 years versus the tens of thousands of
| years needed by light-water reactor spent fuel."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
| fsh wrote:
| Fukushima also released more radiation than all the coal
| that has ever been burned (a few hundred PBq, ignoring
| the thousands of PBq of Xe-133). The amount of radiation
| created by a nuclear power reactor is on an entirely
| different scale than any natural source of radiation.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yet we've had Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island,
| Sellafield and many others (military ones too).
| Unforeseen accidents happen. Wars too, which tend to
| destroy safety equipment.
|
| Artillery was fired around Zaporizhzhia when the reactors
| were still online, Ukraine is currently invading Russia
| near Kursk where two of the mad-graphite RBMK reactors
| are still operational today. I hope they try to avoid
| those when blowing stuff up. Because they _don 't_ have
| containment vessels.
|
| And then see how difficult it is to clean up an accident
| like Fukushima where the containment mostly held. It
| feels like playing with fire.
| exe34 wrote:
| > It feels like playing with fire
|
| Much safer to burn the rest of the planet instead.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we 've had Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island,
| Sellafield_
|
| You're comparing rubber ducks and battleships
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| The difference is the cost coming from handling it. The
| latest figure on the cost to handle Fukushima is $190B from
| 2016.
|
| The great thing today is that we don't need to accept
| radioactive releases from either nuclear power or coal.
| Simply build the cheap scalable option instead: renewables.
| TheGamerUncle wrote:
| while cheaper in some contexts and somewhat scalable,
| renewables are nowhere near being as scalable or
| effective as nuclear, specially as tensions with China
| rise
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Nuclear power which currently has zero new commercial
| reactors under construction in the US while backsliding
| as an energy source due to cost and construction
| timelines now apparently is "effective" and "scalable".
| pfdietz wrote:
| Renewables are vastly more scalable and effective than
| nuclear.
|
| You mentioned China. Last year, China brought more than
| 100x more PV on line than they did nuclear (on a rated
| power basis; levelized basis maybe 30x as much.)
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have
| centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next
| government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do.
| This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which
| IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.
| pyrale wrote:
| Negative industrial byproducts creating costs for future
| generations is an unique challenge? Have you heard of
| climate change?
| bell-cot wrote:
| > ...centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what...
|
| OR, you put the nasty and long-lived radwaste into (say)
| lead barrels, and bury those below some nice, deep, easily-
| monitored ocean trench. Absolutely nobody's going to
| accidentally dig those up. And if the effort needed to
| intentionally do so would be greater than the effort to
| brew their own fresh radwaste, then nobody will bother
| trying that, either.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Barrels don't last when filled with nuclear material. The
| radiation embrittles the materials over time, they
| wouldn't last 100 years. And then all that crap will be
| released into the ocean and swerve all over the world.
| pvaldes wrote:
| People keep proposing that nonsense from 70's but can be
| cured studying some really basic biology and
| oceanography. In 2024 is at a level similar than saying
| that smoking is good for your children. Is not even funny
| as a joke.
|
| > Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up
|
| Read about the concept of vertical migration
| slt2021 wrote:
| japan has limited land, no oil&gas resources, so the nuclear is
| the perfect source of electricity for them, plus they have the
| expertise.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Japan has 34 000km (21 126 miles) of coastline.
|
| They import about 90% of its energy requirements. This
| includes nuclear fuel. So this is far away from "perfect" if
| you can get wind and sun without having to import it.
| vkou wrote:
| > This includes nuclear fuel.
|
| Nuclear fuel is both relatively plentiful, and can be
| sourced from a multitude of countries, both Eastern,
| Western, and, most importantly, unaligned. A lot of
| countries have economically viable (for power generation)
| uranium reserves, but do not exploit them because _global
| prices for it are so low_.
|
| It differs significantly from oil in this respect.
| slt2021 wrote:
| nuclear fuel: nuclear rods can last about 3-7 years, lets
| say 5 on avg. 150 rods per 1 GW reactor. so its like one or
| two rail cars of fuel - extremely compact footprint.
|
| how calculate yourself how much fossil fuel you need to
| power 1 GW power plant for half a decade, and how much CO2
| emissions will you generate?
|
| How many rail cars of coal Germany will need to generate 1
| GW 24/7/365 for 5 years reliably ?
|
| it is just unfair comparison, nuclear is several orders
| magnitude better in all aspects compared to fossil fuel and
| renewable - just due to _physics_ of the process. Nuclear
| is capturing _strong_ and _weak_ forces, while combustion
| is capturing _electromagnetic_ force with piss poor thermal
| efficiency and losses abound.
|
| The only reason countries fumble nuclear energy is because
| they dont invest enough into new designs and constructions
| and still employ old design plants.
|
| If there was as much investment into new nuclear plants as
| it was in renewable tech - we would have solved many of our
| energy needs long long time ago.
| 7952 wrote:
| So for nuclear power to be successful you just have to
| change human nature and politics to secure long term
| investment. And do so in countries that cannot even
| figure out how to properly fund education.
| slt2021 wrote:
| the fact that we allowed non-technical people with
| liberal arts education, who have no concept of physics
| and energy, to make nuclear a political issue is a big
| failure.
|
| Plus oil rich countries lobbying LNG as a greener
| alternative for nuclear is another fail
| 7952 wrote:
| But it is not within your gift to control human nature or
| suppress politics. Or at least I hope its not. A good
| design/proposal/plan considers human factors.
|
| And energy production is not some science experiment
| where you can control all the baseline conditions. It
| exists within a complex mix of economy, environment,
| social system, manufacturing etc. There is no scientific
| method for navigating that. And your industry will
| probably ignore it if there was. Politics is all we have
| for deciding complex interrelated questions.
| visarga wrote:
| Technically, solar is also nuclear.
| slt2021 wrote:
| photovoltaic elements inside solar panel rely on
| _photoelectric_ effect, which is electromagnetic force.
| It cannot be weak /strong force
| Krasnol wrote:
| As the generational costs for the waste management should be.
|
| The odds of some weird future generation digging this stuff up
| for bad reasons already adds enough incalculable costs.
| pyrale wrote:
| I would be curious to know which industry would survive such
| drastic standards.
| Zigurd wrote:
| If you think Hollywood accounting is opaque and full of
| shenanigans, look into electric utilities. Nuclear power is not
| conventionally insurable. The NRC has the most understandable
| explainer I have found here: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-
| rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
|
| The current fad of buying old nukes to power data centers is
| going to be a learning experience for the tech industry about
| taking on the liabilities entailed.
| credit_guy wrote:
| At least in the US such costs are factored in. First of all,
| after Fukushima, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
| performed a huge "Lessons learned" exercise, and asked all the
| power plants to do various upgrades. Here are some links [1],
| [2]. The ask was not "pretty please, can you do this if it's
| not much of a trouble for you", it was "you have to do this by
| this date if you want to continue to operate".
|
| Second, it's the nuclear insurance. The scheme is codified in
| the Price-Anderson Act [3]. Basically, all the nuclear power
| plants need to purchase insurance for $0.5 BN per reactor. If
| anything happens, and the cleanup costs exceed this number,
| then the rest of the industry has to chime in, and the total is
| up to $16 BN _per reactor_. So, if 3 reactors were to have a
| core meltdown, the industry would have to pay close to $50 BN.
| The total estimate of the Fukushima cleanup stands currently at
| about twice that, so one can say that $50 BN is too little, but
| it certainly is not nothing.
|
| Edit: the efficacy of the Price-Anderson Act was tested at the
| Three-Mile Island. Virtually no taxpayer money was used in the
| cleanup [4]. Of course, there were other costs incurred, such
| as in collecting data, doing investigations, upgrading
| regulations and enforcing them, but that's how Government
| should work.
|
| [1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2132/ML21322A288.pdf
|
| [2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-
| experience/fukush...
|
| [3] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821
|
| [4] https://www.gao.gov/products/117345
| accrual wrote:
| > TEPCO speculates that radiation passing through camera
| semiconductor elements caused electrical charge to build up, and
| that the charge will drain if the cameras are left on in a
| relatively low-dose environment. It was the latest setback in a
| very long project.
|
| I found this interesting. I wonder how many of the ICs onboard
| the robot are radiation hardened, and how many are just COTS with
| the hope they'll last for the brief mission.
| Animats wrote:
| There's a company selling a radiation-tolerant TV camera for
| use inside nuclear reactors.[1] It uses a vacuum tube imager (a
| vidicon?). But it may be too big to put on the pointy end of
| the long, thin Fukushima manipulator.
|
| [1] https://diakont.com/nuclear-services/radiation-tolerant-
| cctv...
| duskwuff wrote:
| As I understand it, part of the problem is that the vast
| majority of components simply don't _exist_ in rad-hardened
| versions. The cost of having a hardened part manufactured and
| qualified is high, and demand is low; only a few manufacturers
| bother.
| purpleblue wrote:
| Can you cut the fuel into small pieces and keep them away from
| each other so that they don't reach such a high temperature?
| egorfine wrote:
| We have about 800 tons of the fuel and now we were barely able
| to pick up a few grains.
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