Coincidence that this article is released at the same time as the youtube/google petition campaign?
The New Atomic Age We Need
81–90 of 211 posts
Re: The New Atomic Age We Need
#82> We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. Is this really true? In Lazard's 2014 comparison of total cost per MWh, both wind and solar beat coal and nuclear [1]. Costs have fallen so much that it's becoming hard to justify continued subsidies [2]. [1] http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-ene... [2] http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/us-energy-…
This! In my opinion Thiel does not think far enough and doesn't talk about the real question: Is fission even (economically) competitive? In my opinion (and from what I've read on this subject), it is not and won't be in the foreseeable future. I will quote myself [1]: >People always forget about indirect costs when talking about cheap nuclear energy (risk factors aside). Nobody has ever built a profitable nuclear po…
Here in Germany we used a salt mine to dispose of our nuclear waste, which backfired, to say the least. [1]
How big the eventual costs (the article speaks of "at least €4 billion ($5.3 billion), but more likely somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion") will be is uncertain, and I can't back this up by any real evidence, but my guess is that those who profited from the waste disposal might not be the ones paying for the clean-up.
This all makes me think of the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage" [2]:
>The others quickly dismiss Leela's concerns that the new garbage ball will return and destroy a future generation. Professor Farnsworth replies that it will not be for hundreds of years, presumably by the year 4000, prompting Fry to say "That's the 20th Century spirit!"
[1]http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-weighs-o...
Re: The New Atomic Age We Need
#83Currently only France, US, and Russia can build reactors for energy, but these are using U or Pu in different flavours. This fuel is hard to get. China can't afford that kind of fuel in quanities it will need. This is why China backs breakthrough research in Th fission, delivered by Norway. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.
We have 4x more Thorium on Earth than Uran, 1 gram Thorium gives 3x more energy than Uran and has a shorter halft-time, this means it produces less radioctive waste. The problem is, that a Th-plant can not be used to produce nuclear weapons. That shows that we have a political crisis and not an energy crisis. If Japan wouldn't be afraid to build his nuclear plants on the west-coast (protected from tsunamis but easy t…
Well, U is 10x more common element than Sn. Not just sny U isotope is good for fuel. But you are not quite right. Thorium fuels can breed fissile uranium-233 to be used in various kinds of nuclear reactors.
Re: The New Atomic Age We Need
#84The key problem in my mind is the failure of project management in building reactors. If they said it was going to take 2 years and 1 billion dollars and it stretched out to 3 years and $1.5 billion that is one thing. Back in the 1970s it was more like 2 years stretches to 9 years and $15 billion and you could blame union workers who never did nuclear work before, the no nukes, high interest rates, etc. The industry…
Nuclear plants are also central points of failures, the plant itself needn't even fail, just the electrical distribution from it and you lose 1~6GW. If they pan out, Small Modular Reactors (30MW~300MW range) seem like they could solve many of the issues with existing "large" nuke plants: the sealed core can be built on largeish assembly lines (similar to airliners in size) then floated, flown or driven to site, more…
There's a great deal of engineering/economic appeal to factory made modular reactors, but the weak point is you'd need a cultural shift for people to not be freaked out about having lots of small reactors everywhere.
Re: The New Atomic Age We Need
#85He does not mention bombs. I'm certainly no expert here, but I think I read in the book An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore a long time ago, that if you have the ability to build a nuclear power plant, then building a bomb is not very hard.
I'm not terribly keen on living in a world where most of the countries in Africa, the Middle East etc. are able to build nuclear bombs.
Re: The New Atomic Age We Need
#86> We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. Is this really true? In Lazard's 2014 comparison of total cost per MWh, both wind and solar beat coal and nuclear [1]. Costs have fallen so much that it's becoming hard to justify continued subsidies [2]. [1] http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-ene... [2] http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/us-energy-…
Upvoting this. I must add, we had not uncovered the solar yet, and we barely scratched the potential of HMD generators. Also thorium is quite abundant in Morocco.
Re: The New Atomic Age We Need
#87How does this compare to what Elon Musk says about solar power? In this presentation he shows that a reasonable amount of area could power the entire US (if we used roof tops etc for solar panels). Is that not feasible? https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187
US has lots of sunny areas with little people, agriculture or wildlife, but UK doesn't. Many European countries are dense and cloudy.
It can still help.
Re: The New Atomic Age We Need
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear plants are also central points of failures, the plant itself needn't even fail, just the electrical distribution from it and you lose 1~6GW. If they pan out, Small Modular Reactors (30MW~300MW range) seem like they could solve many of the issues with existing "large" nuke plants: the sealed core can be built on largeish assembly lines (similar to airliners in size) then floated, flown or driven to site, more…
There's a great deal of engineering/economic appeal to factory made modular reactors, but the weak point is you'd need a cultural shift for people to not be freaked out about having lots of small reactors everywhere.
Cultural shifts are funcion of political will.
Re: The New Atomic Age We Need
#89In 1949 the federal government built a test facility at Idaho National Laboratory to study and evaluate new nuclear reactor designs. We owe our nuclear power industry to the foresight of those New Dealers, and we need their openness to innovation again today. Thiel is a self-described conservative libertarian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Political_activiti...
My grandfather died with multiple cancers plus pulmonary fibrosis caused by multiple exposures he received while working in DoE facilities in the early-mid 1950s. In those facilities there were basically no safety procedures. Safe nuclear power was not a goal; more nuclear weapons was the goal. It's no surprise that TFA exaggerates the "foresight" of the damned "New Dealers". They were just like Thiel is, looking to make bank off a public that's not always paying attention. He will feel no more guilt about it than I do for driving on public highways.
Re: The New Atomic Age We Need
#90I like how Thiel writes his sentences about safety, to avoid saying anything wrong. I invite him to spend the rest of his life in Chernobyl or Fukushima. Personally nuclear energy is dangerous because when it goes wrong the result is really bad. And the source of error is infinite, human, software, design, terrorists, war, civil plane, drone ...
0 people have died in the US as a result nuclear power. Chernobyl failed because its operators turned off the emergency failsafe system in order to do a test of the reactor, which was also botched. Look up the Linear no-threshold model of radiation. There's no statistically significant evidence that radiation exposure of even 1000 millirem (average US dosage is 360 millrem, and 2/3rds of that is from natural radiation such as the sun and rocks) has negative health effects.
Also what do you even mean by "the source of error is infinite"? All of those sources of error apply to coal and gas plants, except that nuclear power plants are so much more tightly regulated and protected that these "sources of error" are far more likely to affect coal/gas plants than nuclear.
Check out this information where they crash an F-4 into 10 feet of concrete, reducing the F-4 to dust. Nuclear power reactor containment shields have more than 10 feet of concrete, and even so have procedures for automatic shutdown of the fission process that don't rely on electricity (eg gravity).
FUD such as this is a large part of why we do not have fission today.