I'm not willing to live next to a reactor and I'm not willing to force someone else to. If people really think nuclear is the best option put your money where your mouth is and raise your family next to one.
Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
181–190 of 393 posts
Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
#182A new study in Nature says that using thorium as a nuclear fuel has a higher risk for proliferation into weapons than scientists had believed. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a11907/is-the...
Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
#183Earlier 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…
> Are you honestly arguing that dozens of mSv of radiation annually are safe?
Yes, I am (despite the downvotes). The average background dose at sea level is 4mSv/year. A chest CT scan is 7mSv. The EPA has declared that 50mSv/year is perfectly safe exposure for nuclear, and any other, workers.
> That big bad government is preventing people from doing what they want?
I shouldn't address this, but I feel the need to. Your snide "big bad government" crack implies you think I'm putting a political spin on my arguments. I'm not.
> 50mSv is approaching the level of guaranteed higher incidence of cancer
No, 50mSv is approaching the 100mSv threshold for conclusive evidence of increased cancer risk.
> If you lived in the exclusion zone, you'd be receiving that every single year for the rest of your, and your childrens' lives.
Please stop the vapid appeals to emotion. This is totally unscientific and the root cause of why the general public freaks out unnecessarily over radiation.
> Canada did a survey a few years ago of all their nuclear workers, at much lower levels of lifetime radiation (I will have to look at that paper in detail when I get home. My quick skim though shows you many have misread it. The dosages presented are annualized numbers, not "lifetime".[1]
> The relative lack of cancer deaths in Ukraine wasn't due to 'safe' fallout, but due to the fact that they just closed entire cities and forced everyone within a thousand square miles to leave.
And the relative lack of terrorist attacks in the past 14 years wasn't due to terrorist attacks being hard, but due to the TSA and full-body scanners. You can't prove causality for a lack of events based only on a correlation.
[1] "Doses from the individual workers' various types of exposures have been combined into 'annual doses,' which are the basis of calculations in this study."
Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
#184"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..."
True; many of these dream reactors probably won't work, because that is the nature of things. But the full-scale engineering never gets done because of anti-nuclear propaganda playing on mass public ignorance, so at the rate we're going now we'll never know.
Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do wind and solar provide a solid baseline power. And China builds nuclear plants a lot faster and cheaper than we do, and no known accidents. Maybe we can learn something from them. Plus the whole 90% of a nuclear plant's cost is servicing the debt. Once completed the operational costs are a rounding error.
> How do wind and solar provide a solid baseline power. Properly built and managed distribution networks, along with utility scale battery storage. > And China builds nuclear plants a lot faster and cheaper than we do, and no known accidents. Yet. China still gets more power from wind than nuclear, and they're building out wind generation capacity far faster than nuclear: http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2…
>And when you fail hard, it costs billions of dollars to cleanup: http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-heal....
Using Fukushima as an argument against nuclear is such a silly thing to do, and the decades long freeze on any sort of real progress in meaningfully upgraded or new commercial reactors makes this sort of thing a self fulfilling prophecy.
How many industries have catastrophic failures? How many people have been killed by hydro-electric dams? How much financial damage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
We've created a climate where a completely viable power option that is better than what we have now has had innovation massively stifled due to politics and fearmongering, which has in turn made it more difficult for nuclear plants to be a safe option, which then allows for even more politics and fear mongering.
Fukushima? Yes, it was a catastrophic failure. But it was hit by a 9.0 earthquake and then a tsunami. It was scheduled to be shut down two weeks from the earthquake. It was a 4 decade old plant that was being shut down due to it's age hit by some of the worst possible natural disasters, and even then some better design choices, such as a higher seawall, or not storing the backup generators underground would have prevented it. The condenser units also hadn't been inspected or had maintenance performed on them since basically the reactor's opening. Everything that happened with Fukushima could have been prevented even with it's old technology despite being batter with one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. And this is with 4 decade old technology. With a more favorable political climate, how many advances in safety and efficiency could have been made over those decades?
Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
#186"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..."
Yup. Rocket science is dead easy. Tsiolkovsky, and... that's about it. Rocket engineering, on the other hand...
Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
#187The article is completely unprofessional.
The tone itself is very one-sided - which is bad enough.
However, the factual omissions are ridiculous.
Here are a few examples:
the area used for wind turbines is large, but it is usually re-usable for agriculture, or increasingly off shore
official nuclear death are low - but there is a lot of dispute on the "long tail" of long term deaths from the big nuclear disasters of Ukraine and Japan
they (correctly) mention the environmental cost of materials for renewable energy, but ignore the similar pollution of Uranium mining and enrichment
4th generation nuclear reactor are still not even past the design stage. How can anyone even put a price tag on these ?
3rd generation nuclear reactor are more expensive than claimed in the article. The real prices of real reactors in the real world in the past decade are x3 the expected costs.
There is simply not enough uranium for a full build out of 3rd generation nuclear. 4th generation will be required, and it is still in the r&d stage
There is no mention of the huge problem of load-following when using nuclear plants. You cant just assume 90% CF and then ignore this.
Most importantly, IMHO, they completely ignore the learning curve for solar & wind. This is a proven trend, over last decades, appears to be set to continue, and completely changes the discussion.
And on and on....
My own views are pro-nuclear AND pro-renewable. But this requires a scientific and accurate discussion!
Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dumping it to the ocean is pretty safe. Seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_... However, since people don't easily believe water's a very effective radiation shielding (even if there's an xkcd of it https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ ) and that heavier than water metals kind of tend to stay put at the bottom of the ocean, other means of disposal might be more realistic. Recycling in breed…
Actually, Britain did that. They dumped most of their waste in the channel. Result, 20 years later: The waste did not dilute, the radiation in the channel is damaging the local animals.
It's not supposed to dilute. It should stay put and not spread around.
Most human activities tend to displace natural ecosystems. Waste dumps (nor windmills) are no exception. The question is, is the damage lesser than greater than in proposed alternatives?
Though I do not understand why did they choose to dump the waste to the channel? If I would dispose the waste by sinking, I would use a kilometers deep trench to minimize risks for reacquirement and environmental damage. Do they plan to dig up the waste sometime in the future?
Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
#189I'm not willing to live next to a reactor and I'm not willing to force someone else to. If people really think nuclear is the best option put your money where your mouth is and raise your family next to one.
That is certainly your right, but we should base important technical decisions like this on peer-reviewed science, not knee-jerk emotional reactions.
Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
#190I'm not willing to live next to a reactor and I'm not willing to force someone else to. If people really think nuclear is the best option put your money where your mouth is and raise your family next to one.
Ok.
Source: within 30 miles of two reactor facilities.