361–370 of 393 posts
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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.
I'm really tired of all the internet kids plugging nuclear. The numbers don't work, and the cost of failure is huge. We can put solar on everyone's roof and turbines in windy areas and it's completely safe, dumb nuts simple, and decentralized. Nuclear energy is dead. Let it go.
The numbers work and the cost of "failure" in gen 4 reactors is zero. Try reading the article, its written for people like you. I'm getting tired of old brainwashed hippies pushing their 70's nuclear-hate narrative while gleefully cooking the planet. Every anti-nuclear statement is a pro-coal statement.
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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…
This is a really absurd statement and shows a failure to understand how radiation affects the body. You're missing two key things in that statement; amount of radiation and exposure time. A lot of radiation is deadly over a short amount of time, and a lower amount can be deadly (or at least detrimental) over a longer period of time.
It is said that there is no "safe" level of radiation, radiation is never good. It's just that under certain levels it's unlikely to be dangerous in a human lifetime. But that's the thing, it's unlikely, it still can be.
While you can now walk around the area around Fukushima for ad day and not die, there's a reason nobody's allowed to live there. Because if you did for many years, then you would suffer ill effects. And children and pregnant women in that area would be especially prone to problems.
> 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.
It is ridiculous and arbitrary because it's ONLY counting deaths, and only against one specific metric. It doesn't contextualize those deaths, first of all (dying because you chose to try to install a solar panel on your roof when you're not an experienced roofer and dying because the nuclear plant outside of town had a meltdown are two very different things.)
It also doesn't count the fact that thousands of people lost their homes and businesses and had their lives totally upended by Fukushima. There's impacts of nuclear that solar and wind don't have that are not captured by simply looking at deaths per TWh.
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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…
> Radiation actually isn't all that dangerous, especially after a few months when the fission byproducts that have a tendency to bioaccumulate disappear. This is a really absurd statement and shows a failure to understand how radiation affects the body. You're missing two key things in that statement; amount of radiation and exposure time. A lot of radiation is deadly over a short amount of time, and a lower amount c…
I would also add that until now we have been lucky because nuclear accidents happened in areas with a relatively low population density. Japan has high coastal population density but at Fukushima, half the exclusion zone is on the sea with no one living there.
Now imagine a similar nuclear accident in Belgium or Netherlands requiring a 80 km exclusion zone. That would be a substantial part of the country impacted. For example, check the location of : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station
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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?
Or does it increase the possible damage, but the security is high enough that the expected damage is lower than storing it elsewhere?
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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…
There are also physical limitations with load following. In a fission reactor you're dealing with a steady state of influx of fission products (by the primary nuclear reaction) and the delayed decay of those products. In fact a large portion of the heat generated by a fission reactor comes from the delayed decay of the fission products. Furthermore some of the fission products are very efficient neutron catchers; not…
"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…
Molten sodium was at the heart of the Santa Susana nuclear disaster in southern California, which was covered up for fifty years. Needless to say, I'm skeptical.
Santa Susana was a sodium-cooled reactor, but a "molten salt reactor" uses salt. It's chemically inert and doesn't require pressurization.
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The cost of everything else about a nuclear reactor is based in hugely understated fossil-fuel subsidised cost basis. That is going to inflate when you don't have those fossil fuels around, particularly for elements for which hydrocarbons are essential inputs or exceptionally difficult to substitute (coking coal for steel, much or all transport, chemical feedstocks, industrial process heating). But that's less a conc…
> The cost of everything else about a nuclear reactor is based in hugely understated fossil-fuel subsidised cost basis. I don't see how that makes nuclear worse than other methods of energy production
The most immediate implication is that it simply invalidates a great deal of present future-cost/future-value analysis, by noting that the entire present price and cost regime is severely faulty. It may well be that money is the wrong unit of economic analysis. There are a number of people who've suggested that currency should be considered to be backed in energy (though that's not the same as saying money is energy -- a crucial but nuanced distinction) -- Arthur C. Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson, and F. Buckminster Fuller among them. I've traced the concept back to H.G. Wells (of whom Clarke was a fan).
Which would suggest that an energy flows model of an economy is of interest, and that for the nuclear instance, you'd want to sort that out based on total available nuclear energy, conversions for provisioning synthesised hydrocarbons (or other fuels, though CH chains are awfully appealing), and how much net free energy (for other activities) you're left with. Plus factors for risk and such.
That could be compared with the models for renewables-based alternatives.
A key benefit to most renewables schemes is that they pose relatively few widespread catastrophic systemic risks. Grid stability seem the main issue if we're still talking electrical systems (and the advantages of electricity are such that we almost certainly are). But solar and wind plants don't suddenly go into catastrophic meltdown, and the tech stack for each is relatively small.
(Hydro power can see regional catastrophic failure, see the Banqiao Dam disaster, 170k killed. But a lot of things had to go wrong, most of which aren't significantly different from what can befall a nuclear site, and the long-term consequences are fairly benign: the region is now home to 7+ million people, 40 years on.)
But, answering your question in part: it seems to me that a combined measure of net free energy, and systemic risk is probably a better assessment criteria than some putative present "cost" analysis based on a flawed pricing system.
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Fuel is a minuscule percentage of the cost of building and operating a nuclear reactor. The cost of uranium is currently about $90/kg. Citing a previous poster, around 70 MT of uranium is used every year, which comes to about 6.3 G$, which comes to about 2.61 $/TWh. As per the NEI, the cost of nuclear energy is 108 $/TWh. At current prices, uranium accounts for 2.4% of the cost of producing nuclear energy. Keeping th…
Do those calculations (108$/TWh) include the cost of safely getting rid of the waste and the insurance costs to cover the damage done by an accident? Let alone the costs of accidents.
IPCC assimilates data from a large range of sources and viewpoints. It's about as close to a concensus view as you'll find. And considerably more sober than the parent article here.
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Only thorium breeders seem feasible for commercial production. Plutonium breeders are terribly unsafe.
Do you have any link of any real development of any useful thorium reactor? If it has benefits, why isn't anybody getting rich developing it now? Even if the western politicians or corporations have any supposed agenda, why don't Russia and China develop or use them instead of scheduling the plutonium (Pu) reactors?