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

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

#301

Post by Turing_Machine » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:50 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?

Where do you get this stuff, anyway? Wherever it was, I would recommend not placing any credibility on that source in the future.

In fact, if you ground up the Fukushima reactor whole, to a fine powder, and dispersed it over the entire ocean, it wouldn't make one bit of significant difference with respect to the concentration of radionuclides.

Heck, the Soviets used to dump their scrapped sub reactors into the Arctic Ocean whole. There are dozens of them up there, probably (I don't have a hard number on this). It hasn't killed any oceans or continents yet.

Would I go scuba diving near one of the dump sites? Hell no! Am I going to lose any sleep over the prospect of them killing the entire ocean? Likewise hell, no!

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

#302

Post by yk » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:52 AM UTC

frankus wrote: post #200

If they're going to have something called a NERD NOTE, they should at least get their units right: "The entire planet’s electrical consumption is right around 5 terawatt-hours." 5TWh per what? Per second? Per hour (then why not 5TW?)? Per year? Cumulative over all of human history?

Its roughly 5 TWh per 2h (to spare you the algebra, thats 2.5 TW power generation)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_power_generation

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

#303

Post by yk » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:53 AM UTC

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?

Because burning it involves superheated, radioactive phosphoric acid.

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

#304

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:55 AM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #292

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 so…

Here in Missouri, Ameren tried for years to get the CWIP-financing ban [0] overturned so that rate-payers would build a new nuclear plant rather than investors. In a rare victory for representative government, they spun their wheels until the dropping price of natural gas made the whole exercise academic. They're hoping that other fuels will simultaneously peak at some point so they can lock their customers into decades of expensive power, but it won't be anytime soon.

[0] Why is there a ban, you ask? Because the first nuclear plant they built, in the 1970s, had such catastrophic cost overruns that the entire state swore, "never again".

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

#305

Post by hueving » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:55 AM UTC

merb wrote: post #202

RealityVoid wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt that claim.

it's true. somewhat. I mean the energy of the nuclear station stays constant. however the peak power of the solar panels will be higher. but I doubt that the solar panels will still be creating less energy over a longer period of time. unless you build both inside a desert and there you would have other problems like the sand which affects the lifetime of your panels, etc.. btw. i'm against nuclear and non renewable…

How can you be against nuclear when you don't even understand the level of output of a nuclear plant? You also suggest that nuclear is mature, but that doesn't mean there aren't new reactor designs being developed.

Solar is also mature by your lame definition of just being around for a long time. In fact, solar has been around longer than nuclear in that regard so it must be more mature then. /s

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

#306

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 2:59 AM UTC

david-given wrote: post #211

kuschku wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The channel's a really dumb place to dump waste. There's a massive difference between a life-rich continental shelf with a complex ecosystem, and the barren abyssal seafloors five miles down. Put the waste there and it will just stay there for millennia.

This doesn't seem like a very straightforward process. If it were, I'm sure we'd get rid of all sorts of nasty shit that way. Is every component of "the safe nuclear power we'll have in future" yet to be developed?

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

#307

Post by Retric » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 3:14 AM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #275

Retric wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Li your down capacity after just 3 years and you might get 15 years total. Pumped storage is good for 50 years before a refit and the reservoir is probably good hundreds if not thousands of years.

Of course, pumped storage (or any kind of hydro) is many orders of magnitude more dangerous and environmentally destructive than fission. The Banqiao Reservoir dam failure alone killed over 170,000 people and made over 11 million homeless. I worry far more about the hundreds of millions of people living downstream of the Three Gorges Dam than I do about people living near fission plants.

That dam failed when 1 year's worth of rain fell over 24 hours if it had not been there a lot of people would have died anyway.

On net Dams have saved far more than 170,000 lives in china alone. Flood control is more or less a necessity in the modern world adding energy generation on top of that is a minimal risk. ex: From 1998 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_China_floods loss of 4150 people, and 180 million people were affected.

PS: Direct deaths where ~26,000 people. The 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine which where blamed on the dam, but that was a convenient excuse and far from the root cause.

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

#308

Post by flopto » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 3:32 AM UTC

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…

As I understand it, another important part of New Zealand's anti-nuclear position is the French bombing of the Rainbow Warrior--a Greenpeace boat en route to protest French nuclear tests--in a New Zealand port. The lack of international response to the attack certainly had a big impact on foreign policy, and I have to think that it influenced popular opinion of nuclear power as well. Incidentally, this was just a few months after Lange's Oxford Union debate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

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

#309

Post by bcoates » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 3:34 AM UTC

acqq wrote: post #233

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…

> There is simply not enough uranium for a full build out of 3rd generation nuclear This is really important and is often avoided to be discussed: even if the 10% of all world's energy needs are covered by the nuclear energy at this moment, we know we're using some 70 Ktons of uranium per year. Then to use only nuclear energy we'd need 700 Ktons per year. Currently identified uranium resources total 5.5 Mtons, which…

It's ignored because it doesn't matter. Mineral reserves only count ore that can be extracted economically at current prices; at current prices we have sufficient uranium for well longer than it takes to find and extract more (so there is no economic incentive to look).

If usage increased greatly and there was some prospect of greatly increased prices lots (hundreds of times current reserves) of marginal ores become available.

This doesn't hurt the economics of uranium fission for power because fuel prices aren't a significant cost. (this is why it's so hard to make breeders economical -- the main benefit is waste disposal and it's hard to compete with a hole in the ground on price.)

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

#310

Post by witty_username » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 3:49 AM UTC

beat wrote: post #206

13thLetter wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Full scale engineering, free of the liberal treehugging you decry, happens in China, India, Russia, and elsewhere. You'd think we'd be seeing better results than we are.

Well, at least Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant was being delayed due to protests by local people. Another reason why better results are not being obtained is because of the subsidy on CO2 emitting fuels by not taxing the externalities (which would make nuclear power significantly more profitable) and also difficulties in obtaining nuclear material (NSG, for example). Kudankulam power plant generates power at 4.29 rupees/kW.h which is barely profitable compared to other methods (mostly fossil fuels).