Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by yk » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:10 AM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #195

yk wrote: post #138

So nuclear is cheaper if one takes the numbers from the industry for cost, while ignoring the problem of spend fuel. And ignoring the actual main cost of nuclear power, which empirically is the property damage in Pripyat and Fukushima.

>Pripyat The USSR was horrendous at building things in a safe manner. Go look at their track record building submarines vs. the US. Someone making a shitty version of something and it being bad is not a good argument against making a proper version of it. >Fukushima I've spent a fair amount of words talking about Fukushima elsewhere in here, so I'll keep this short: A 4 decade old plant that was being decommissioned…

Thing is, catastrophic failure occurs if safety assumptions fail. There is nothing in your argument that improves my opinion of the current safety assumptions.

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

#292

Post by intrasight » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:15 AM UTC

Utilities are mostly free to build nuclear power plants. They don't because a) they can afford the construction cost, and b) they can't afford the insurance cost. So the nuclear industry says "no problem, we'll just ask the government to subsidize the construction cost and pass laws to shield you from liability". But they are finding that the "public risk - private profit" paradigm doesn't sell so well anymore for some reason.

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

#293

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:16 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #167

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…

> 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.

I don't disagree with this, but the wells are sunk and producing. We should definitely not continue with hydraulic fracturing; in the interim, existing natural gas supplies can make up the reduction from nuclear's decline until solar and wind overtake both.

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

#294

Post by yk » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:25 AM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #272

yazriel wrote: post #187

The 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…

Could you clarify the "huge problem of load-following" for nuclear power plants? My understanding is that it's mostly a licensing issue rather than a technical issue, and in practice hasn't had a big impact on CF[1] [1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo... "Most of the currently operating Generation II nuclear reactors were designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power pla…

Thing is to reduce the electrical output of a reactor, you can either reduce the thermal output, but then the entire reactor core needs to cool, or you have to reduce the efficiency of the electricity generation. In the first case we are talking about a timescale of days and in the second case you are burning fuel for nothing. So NPRs are not designed to do much of the second.

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

#295

Post by nkurz » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:28 AM UTC

ageofwant wrote: post #263

carpdiem wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've misunderstood the point. Terawatt-hours is ambiguous, without specifying a time period. In particular, Terawatt-hours can be converted to Joules. To say that humanity's energy usage is X Joules is meaningless without specifying the time period that that energy is used over. For example, it means very different things to say that humanity uses 5 TWh per day than to say that humanity uses 5 TWh per year…

The context is deathprint” (casualties per terawatt-hour) or deaths/joule, time cancels out. If you read the NERD Note alone your right of course.

That's not the context that everyone else is referring to. They are referring to this:

"[NERD NOTE: A terawatt is a trillion watts. The entire planet’s electrical consumption is right around 5 terawatt-hours. One TWh (terawatt-hour) is a constant flow of a trillion watts of electricity for a period of one hour.]"

The argument others are making (which I think is correct) is that it is meaningless to say "The entire planet’s electrical consumption is right around 5 terawatt-hours" without specifying a time frame over which that consumption occurs.

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

#296

Post by Turing_Machine » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:37 AM UTC

anon1mous wrote: post #285

Turing_Machine wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very simply, you're wrong. Badly wrong. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/nuclear-fuel-from-th... The ocean contains 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium already. 4.5. BILLION. TONNES. Dispersed in water. I haven't noticed any continents dying off because of this, have you?

Have you heard about that discovery called radioactivity? Different isotopes? Ocean water >>> fresh water?

Sure, I've heard of all of those things. What do they have to do with your claim?

You claimed that "a few tons" of uranium or plutonium, dispersed, could "kill the population of a continent".

Sorry, that's nonsense.

Have you heard of arithmetic? Try doing some. Start by figuring out how many tonnes of air there are over North America, then figure out what concentration of plutonium would result from dispersing a "few tonnes" in that volume of air.

Hint: Not nearly enough to kill everyone on the continent. Likely not even enough to make the cancer rate go up by any measurable amount.

Here, I'll even help you out a little. North America covers about 25 million square kilometers, or 25 trillion square meters, and there are roughly 10,000 kg of air over every square meter at standard air pressure, so we're looking at about 2.5x10^17 kg of air, or 2.5x10^14 metric tonnes of air. Plug in whatever number you like for a "few" tonnes of radioactive material and figure out what concentration will result.

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

#297

Post by Turing_Machine » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:37 AM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #273

onli wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that does make sense. To build a wind mill and to distribute the costs is a totally different kind of economic endeavor than to build and finance a nuclear power plant, which can only be profitable with state subventions anyway.

Which grid-scale wind or solar projects are profitable without being subsidized by the government? I'm not aware of any.

Neither is the person who modded this down, apparently. :-)

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

#298

Post by barney54 » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:38 AM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #272

yazriel wrote: post #187

The 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…

Could you clarify the "huge problem of load-following" for nuclear power plants? My understanding is that it's mostly a licensing issue rather than a technical issue, and in practice hasn't had a big impact on CF[1] [1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo... "Most of the currently operating Generation II nuclear reactors were designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power pla…

Load following is a technical issues--nukes are limited in the amount they can load-follow. But winds cannot load follow at all and solar can help some, but doesn't necessarily help cover peak daily load. For example, yesterday in California the system peak load was at 5:49 pm, but solar PV peak was at 9:44 am. data: http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20151102_DailyRenewa...

Nukes aren't great for load following, but they can load follow some--which is better than wind and solar. To really load follow, you need hydro or nat gas turbines (though nat gas combined cycle can load follow).

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

#299

Post by aianus » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:40 AM UTC

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.

> but no one wants to live near it

Source? Can I buy a house near a nuclear plant for 50% off? If so I'm down. I'll even increase my "risks" by buying a Ferrari with the savings I made off the irrational fools :)

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

#300

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:41 AM UTC

13thLetter wrote: post #184

jandrese wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]