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Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

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Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#141

Post by logfromblammo »

interconnector wrote: post #8
peoii wrote: post #2

It's the sad truth that people seem very for nuclear, but no one wants to live near it. Of course, I've seen articles regarding people who don't want to live near wind turbines, so maybe people are just far to fickle.

Have you ever stood next to giant wind turbines? While driving through an area with hundreds of 100 meter wind turbines, I stopped to take a closer look at them. They are genuinely fear inducing, and feel alien. I could not stay close to one for more than a few minutes before I was overcome with dread.

While driving south on I-65 through Indiana from Chicago, there is a huge wind farm just north of Lafayette. Each one of the elevated turbines, as a potential hazard to air traffic, has a blinking red light on the top.

At night, you can look out across the flat terrain and see dozens of red lights, blinking in unison. Every time, I think to myself, "This place wouldn't be half bad for riding out the zombie apocalypse."

Though now that you mention aliens, the first strikes of an alien invasion are far more likely to hit the more centralized generator plants, so areas served by wind farms might just retain grid power long enough to organize some form of resistance. Or at least until the second-wave bombers arrive.

When I stand next to one, I just think "free electricity" and sometimes also "free bird stew", but usually "Why don't these things get covered in graffiti?"

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#142

Post by DanBC »

novalis78 wrote: post #116
toomuchtodo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone brushes over that, the billions of dollars to build a plant, and the ~10 year construction time. Any nuclear power plant that has construction started today won't be cost competitive with renewables when it comes online. It would be like building a new coal plant in the US today. You simply can't compete with wind, solar, and natural gas (which is still superior to coal, and I don't mind it being a stranded…

Makes you wonder how they built the first generation of reactors in a few years time for a couple of million usd. http://thorconpower.com/costing/should-cost-versus-did-cost

At least in UK the costs got offset to clear up. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-21298117

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#143

Post by Turing_Machine »

jo909 wrote: post #6
pyrocat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been migrating to cities for years and years now, the rural areas of America are less populated than ever. I'm sure there's some middle ground where we can put new power plants that are relatively unpopulated.

Transporting electrical power over long distances is expensive. If most demand is in cities, most power plants need to be relatively near cities.

High voltage transmission lines are actually pretty efficient. We routinely distribute power over hundreds of kilometers. There are a couple that are over 2,000 km long, and numerous examples over 1,000 km.

http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-l...

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#144

Post by jandrese »

pjc50 wrote: post #100

"We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors, on the same amount of land, but with no water cooling, no risk of meltdowns, and the ability to use our stockpiles of nuclear “waste” as a secondary fuel." This is not a production-ready technology, though. I believe there are lingering problems with corrosion. And the claim that the MSR doesn't require secondary water cooling is odd: what's the…

Yeah, there are a lot of alternate nuclear reactor designs that look great on paper but have never had the full scale engineering done to see if it is practical. And they look cheap because you don't even know half of the stuff you have to do that makes it expensive.

It's like rocket design where you go "just put a bunch of explosives in a tube and go into space, this shouldn't be too expensive or difficult..."

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#145

Post by steffenfrost »

Retric wrote: post #71
brrt wrote: post #45

Actually, renewable energy is, when you actually run the numbers in a sensible way, pretty cost effective: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312... - this finds that with 90% solar/wind and modest amounts of storage, electricity would be cheaper in 2030 than it is today, and that the cheapest option is actually a vast overcapacity. There are plenty of flaws with that article, but still less tha…

They assumed electrochemical storage which is really expensive and invalidates there findings, renewables would be significantly cheaper than there suggesting.

Battery cost are projected to drop significantly over the next 5 - 10 years.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#146

Post by jandrese »

novalis78 wrote: post #129
seanflyon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think unregulated nuclear is a good idea. Safer reactors would require less regulation and you could argue that even for current reactors our regulation is excessive. The bottom line is that efficient regulation is a hard problem and to use nuclear power we need to either solve that problem or endure inefficient regulation.

It's not that simple. Nuclear regulation in the US has turned (similar to the FDA) into an innovation stifling behemoth... It's a lobbying place and a capital sink and has little to do with safety. If it was about safety, they would shut down current reactor designs yesterday and had started working on Thorium alternatives 20 years ago. The youtube link I posted from TEAC7 conference does explain that quite well.

The current regulation has been pretty effective at what it was intended to do: stop the production of nuclear power plants without the politically unpopular attempt to outright ban them.

People saw Chernobyl and said "none of that in my backyard" and successfully managed to write rules so onerous that they're effectively a ban.

Unfortunately, any plans they had for a solar power revolution in the 70s died when the technology turned out to be outrageously expensive and impractical, and we've been stuck burning coal waiting for the technology to catch up. 40 years of filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses because of one spectacular failure halfway around the world and one scare in our own country.

Another irony is the fact that all of our current reactors are old designs and less safe than new ones would be if we were allowed to build them.

Of course all of the political pressure has also killed our waste management plan as well, so everybody has to make due with less safe ad-hoc setups on every site.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#147

Post by badloginagain »

seanflyon wrote: post #121
novalis78 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a large amount of startup capital is of regulatory nature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUdwgbh6he4

I don't think unregulated nuclear is a good idea. Safer reactors would require less regulation and you could argue that even for current reactors our regulation is excessive. The bottom line is that efficient regulation is a hard problem and to use nuclear power we need to either solve that problem or endure inefficient regulation.

There's a difference between regulated nuclear and over-regulated nuclear. If you take a look at the regulations around nuclear startup/operation you'll see some of the policies are insane.

Compared to fossil fuels, which has been successfully lobbied to be under-regulated, you'll stark differences. If fossil had to even approach the same safety/environmental rigour of nuclear, fossil fuel market share would drop quickly.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#148

Post by JacobAldridge »

pippy wrote: post #136

I'm in the awkward position of supporting nuclear power in a country that has its anti-nuclear stance apart of its national identity. New Zealands Prime Minster David Lange famously argued against it at an Oxford Union debate, and ever since kiwis have viewed it as us standing against the 'big guy'. Some people I've spoken to view this as on par with not supporting the All Blacks. To top this off, they typically have…

Plus Uranium is dug up across the ditch and comes in a Wallabies jersey - how very unpatriotic.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#149

Post by jcranmer »

ebbv wrote: post #135
jcranmer wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The total number of people who have died in all nuclear radiation incidents (excluding the use of atomic weapons) is perhaps 20,000, with all but 100 coming from a single incident (Chernobyl). That number is less than the number of people who will have died from pollution from coal power points, alone, last year, let alone the effects of coal mining. Nuclear power has a big image problem: people overestimate the expe…

Yes but how does it compare with the number of people who have died due to solar or wind power? And while Fukushima may have had a "low" number of fatalities (so far), the mortality statistics don't even begin to paint a full picture of the negative impact of these disasters. Nuclear power has an "image problem" for a reason; when a disaster happens it's a truly major disaster. > If you scale deaths per TWh, nuclear…

The current estimate of the number of excess cancer deaths that will ever be caused by Fukushima is between 0 and 100. Radiation actually isn't all that dangerous, especially after a few months when the fission byproducts that have a tendency to bioaccumulate disappear.

Deaths per TWh is not ridiculous and arbitrary. It's comparing energy sources by how much death they will cause for the amount of energy they produce. Any other comparison would be unfair.

The problem with wind and solar is that they produce so little energy, you need to build a lot of infrastructure to match the energy you'd get from even a single coal plant, let alone a nuclear plant (note that nuclear power plants produce very high amounts of power for the space they take up). You can't ignore the fact that more people are going to die from construction accidents with solar power, even if you assume that the construction accident rate is the same (in deaths per man-hour) for both nuclear and solar plant operation.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#150

Post by jandrese »

PolLambert wrote: post #83
mbil wrote: post #19

I don't know anything about nuclear energy, but a friend who works in nuclear tech told me that the reason thorium as an energy source hasn't been embraced is because its byproduct can be used for weapons. That doesn't look to be exactly accurate (based on a few minutes of googling), but there might be some truth to it. http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-w...

The reverse is actually true. Nobody uses Thorium since you can't make bombs out of them. Thorium is very unsuited to weaponize since one of the byproducts of the fuel process (U-232) decays in to a hard gamma-emitter. This not only makes the material dangerous to handle, it will also wreak havoc with bomb electronics, will require heavy shielding and be very easy to detect. Due to its unsuitability for bombs , the m…

Emitting hard gammas seems like it would be troublesome for a power plant as well.
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