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Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

energyrealityproject.com

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

#161

Post by hamiltonkibbe »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #73
merpnderp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

utility scale battery storage seems highly improbable to ever be cheaper than nuclear. If we figure a pretty generous 50% loss of energy, that means you need twice as much power production to service the nights and windless days.

Lithium batteries are in no way going to be so inefficient as to have a 50% loss of energy. They're already cost competitive in Hawaii for utility scale storage: http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaii-co-op-solarcity-ink-d...

What happens when when 52MWh (~216 tons of lithium iron batteries) goes into thermal runaway?

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

#162

Post by PolLambert »

anon1mous wrote: post #119
brrt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We burn it! That is, nuclear burn it, not chemically. And what can't be burned can be bombarded with neutrons into radiological inertia. And what can't be neutralized in that sense can be molten into a ceramic, more specifically, a glass, and stored underground. Which is of course where it came from, when you think of it. Seriously, nuclear waste storage is not a problem . This page gives an excellent eplanation: htt…

Do you burn it? Why is it than that every reactor I know of, in US, WE, Japan, stores tones of extremely dangerous waste on site?

Since regulations don't allow any other option e.g. the US doesn't allow reprocessing.

Also: what better place to temporarily store nuclear waste in the exact same place where it is produced where safety and security measures are already in place?

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

#163

Post by thomasahle »

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…

Apparently, most nuclear power plants even produce less energy than if their area was instead covered by solar panels. Says Musk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-n6xJOFbvA

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

#164

Post by vlehto »

bluthru wrote: post #110

Great points as to why nuclear isn't our best option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3nhhOitYmk

1. You can make same argument about any energy recourse. "we need so big number of them, that it's futile." I guess my grandchildren will die then.

2. No way to recycle.. Except there is. Over half of current energy production happens in countries that already have nuclear weapon, or are part of NATO. So because Ghana can't have heavy water nuclear power plant, U.S. can't either?

3. Price going up with the cheapest fuel out there does not sound like much of an issue. He does not quantify anything.

4. France needs to use huge amounts of water for cooling because they produce about 75% of their electricity with nuclear. If average would be even 50% of electricity produced by nukes, we could breathe lot easier with the climate change. You can also cool with seawater.

Fukushima proved that even with completely fucked up security culture, dated power plant and overall completely unpredictable carnage, nuclear is still safe.

5. Nuclear is centralized and that's not hip-n-cool. This last point is the best one IMO. But it's more of an argument why we should not rely only on nuclear. Not a reason to abstain from it.

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

#165

Post by natch »

The word "centralized" does not appear anywhere in their post, which tells me that they are not thinking about that as an issue. But it is an important bias of nuclear energy, the bias toward centralization. One of the benefits of solar is that it can be either centralized, or decentralized, or a hybrid of the two. Being less biased in this way, it opens up more flexible options.

Another important aspect of solar is that its performance is a moving target. Because solar cells are improving over time, comparisons against them need to be kept updated, or else the underlying assumptions of the comparison are invalid.

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

#166

Post by kuschku »

mikeyouse wrote: post #132
vonmoltke wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is going to be allowed to live in those areas for a very long time. That doesn't mean it isn't safe to live there. It means an overcautious government won't let people live there. You even said yourself the highest levels outside the plant grounds are only approaching the levels of increased cancer incidence. So, what other than abundance of caution and paranoia about radiation is keeping people from returning…

Are you honestly arguing that dozens of mSv of radiation annually are safe? That big bad government is preventing people from doing what they want? 50mSv is approaching the level of guaranteed higher incidence of cancer -- If you lived in the exclusion zone, you'd be receiving that every single year for the rest of your, and your childrens' lives. Canada did a survey a few years ago of all their nuclear workers, at m…

And even today there are areas even in Germany where you can’t eat mushrooms or eat boars because they are still having residue radiation from chernobyl!

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

#167

Post by bad_user »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #28
tomcam wrote: post #21

I am not reflexively anti-nuclear. However, I have never heard a satisfactory answer to the simple question: "How do we store nuclear waste safely?"

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…

> You simply can't compete with ... natural gas

Not necessarily, not if you include the environmental costs. Natural gas may be considered "superior", if you don't mind the damaging effects of hydraulic fracturing over the environment. Water contamination is no small deal.

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

#168

Post by berntb »

jandrese wrote: post #144
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..."

I thought e.g. TerraPower was beyond that stage?

Sources?

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

#169

Post by bsder »

mikeyouse wrote: post #132
vonmoltke wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is going to be allowed to live in those areas for a very long time. That doesn't mean it isn't safe to live there. It means an overcautious government won't let people live there. You even said yourself the highest levels outside the plant grounds are only approaching the levels of increased cancer incidence. So, what other than abundance of caution and paranoia about radiation is keeping people from returning…

Are you honestly arguing that dozens of mSv of radiation annually are safe? That big bad government is preventing people from doing what they want? 50mSv is approaching the level of guaranteed higher incidence of cancer -- If you lived in the exclusion zone, you'd be receiving that every single year for the rest of your, and your childrens' lives. Canada did a survey a few years ago of all their nuclear workers, at m…

> http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/153/4/309.long

And yet you leave out an important point directly in the abstract:

> The following significant results were found for males and females combined: a deficit in the standardized incidence ratio for all cancers combined

This makes me suspicious as it probably means we have too little statistical power so that an increased elevance in one or two rare cancers skews the numbers.

It also includes the 1950's in its analysis. And, let's face it, we weren't that far from people playing with plutonium spheres. It was in the 50's when people started to get serious about nuclear safety.

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

#170

Post by AnthonyMouse »

seanflyon wrote: post #137
novalis78 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not arguing in favor of our current regulation, I'm saying that it is hard to fix and you can't throw it out altogether.

It's not actually that hard to fix. We know how to regulate large industrial operations that use dangerous substances. The problem is that we don't use those regulations, we use a whole different set of regulations that were created by people whose specific intent was to make construction uneconomical.

Example. One of the problems that have occurred is that the regulations change during construction. You spend a billion dollars on construction and then the regulations change and you have to start over. The simple change that the construction rules a plant is evaluated under are the ones in effect when construction began would solve half the problem in itself.

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