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To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

nytimes.com

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Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#641

Post by kashkhan »

pvaldes wrote: post #634
kashkhan wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima was badly built, badly protected, and badly operated. First few decades airplanes were deadly. Now not so much. All tech can be tamed if you put in the effort.

All tech can be tamed, the problem is "tamed by who and for doing what against who?". As any sirian children could teach us, airplanes are deadlier than ever.

technology enables. it doesn't care about life or death. It's not supposed to.

Humans are supposed to are about life or death. Take your beef up with humans using tech to kill.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#642

Post by calibration263 »

coldtea wrote: post #497
Paradigma11 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did any Non-Soviet scientists and engineers say this?

No, but Non-Soviet scientists said the same things for other reactors that ended in disasters.

Which reactors? And which had disasters anywhere close to the scale of Chernobyl? And of those, which of those reactors were newer than Chernobyl?

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#643

Post by paulmd »

Graphon1 wrote: post #628
paulmd wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every design will be old after a few decades. Time passes. A truly stunning insight. You've somehow managed to miss the entire point you were responding to. A power plant that is designed today is designed with 50 more years' knowledge of possible failure modes than a plant that was designed 50 years ago. Does that mean that it cannot fail? No, but as adults we are constantly exposed to risks of all kinds and life…

> Time passes. A truly stunning insight. completely unnecessary sarcasm.

On the other hand, you didn't offer any rebuttal to the arguments I offered, either. You just found fault with a single line and decided to go with it.

A tone argument is a logical fallacy, and I made a substantive post. Do you care to offer anything else in response?

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#644

Post by n2dasun »

pvaldes wrote: post #630
n2dasun wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I graduated 3 years after you (just snooped your linkedin) and was a Nuke Submariner. I've always been a big proponent of nuclear, even after leaving it, but I'd have to agree somewhat with your statements. Fear drives narratives very easily. The Fukushima disaster occurred 5.5 years ago, and still holds a leading spot in news headlines today.

> The Fukushima disaster occurred 5.5 years ago, and still holds a leading spot in news headlines today Maybe is for the recurrent events of "oups, another leak of radioactive water to the ocean, the third this month. Our salutes to Alaska" in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Fair point

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#645

Post by afterburner »

mikevp wrote: post #618
afterburner wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly how Fukushima happened: "these plants will be so expensive to decommission, we can't afford NOT to keep extending their lifetime!"

Or, "We planned to decommission these plants, but construction on the replacement plants was blocked."

Either way, a major safety decision basically came down to a political decision over finances. And because nuclear power was involved, the downside became huge. Even when nuclear power is designed to be safer, it comes down to the whims of human politics. Why risk making the downside of a poor political decision so massive?

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#646

Post by hvidgaard »

alphydan wrote: post #513
hvidgaard wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage and recycling of spend fuel rods are not a problem. We have not all that much waste, and plenty of places to put it. And breeder reactors seems to be able to convert part of it into usable fuel again. I agree that it is a temporary solution, but it's the best we got until we figure out how to store energy efficiently, and generate truly renewable energy. I'm sceptical of wind, because it produce a large amoun…

I studied in a lot of detail the waste generated by dismantling wind turbine blades while working for a wind manufacturer. If we were to recycle today all the blades of all the turbines in the world reaching 20 years of age, the weight would be equivalent to a few hours of household waste generated only in the UK. So the amount of waste is completely trivial (at this point), and it can be down-cycled easily (some com…

That sounds like appeles to oranges. The issue with rotorblades is that they're made of a composite that we at best can turn into a building material. We cannot currently break it down to it's components, nor can we do that with the down cycled material. That is in sharp contrast to the vast majority of household waste which we can break down and recycle, or just safely burn it.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#647

Post by mcv »

GVIrish wrote: post #430
jessaustin wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment taught me that 100,000 people still unable to return to their homes five years later is no big deal... And if you actually believe that "not a single person killed" bullshit, I got a bridge to sell you. Death from cancer is still death, even if it takes a year or two.

I think parent post is downplaying things a bit, but I'd take the risk of 100k people bring displaced by a nuclear accident over 100's of millions of people being displaced by climate change.

I totally agree. But when we have the option to not displace anyone, I prefer that. Nuclear technology is to me at best a transitional technology to fill the gap until solar is ready to take over. And it seems solar kind of is already.

I'm not arguing for taking nuclear reactors offline, but it's not clear to me why we should build new ones if solar is cheaper and cleaner. Of course large scale electricity storage is still an issue for solar, and I can understand solar isn't the best option for cloudy countries, but I do think it's important to look beyond nuclear.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#648

Post by lmm »

lispm wrote: post #586
lmm wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody builds one where I live. But there are several nuclear power plants. But most of them are now history. They are not in some remote areas, but near populated areas with millions of people. This is a failure of planning (or possibly of international diplomacy in the case of e.g. Japan). In terms of the engineering constraints, nuclear plants are a lot easier to build far away from people than any of the altern…

> This is a failure of planning It has to do with costs, lack of space, various engineering and environmental constraints, business decisions, ... > nuclear plants are a lot easier to build far away from people than any of the alternatives There is no far away from people in Europe. Even in Russia they have built their new dangerous breeder next to a large town. Keeps the engineers committed to the thing... > Baselin…

>> Baseline power is a requirement

> For what?

Modern civilization.

> Biomass.

Still carbon-based. Burning x tonnes of hydrocarbons is still burning x tonnes of hydrocarbons even if the carbon was only recently captured from the atmosphere - it's basically no different from burning coal and running a sequestration process in parallel. Carbon is fungible.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#649

Post by Retric »

Analog24 wrote: post #621
Retric wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without the damage from the tidal wave Fukushima would have been far less of an issue. With a proper wall there would not have been significant issues with the Tsunami, thus making that wall a critical safety feature that failed. As to passive safety systems, many modern designs can't be left unattended for a month. Because they are not passively safe only being able to go longer without issues. Anyway this is all ab…

I will admit that had there been a better sea wall the Fukushima incident would have much less severe. But I still think it's beside the point. As to your point about passive safety systems only working for a finite period of time before causing issues, would you mind providing some sources for this claim? As far as I know this is completely false. The very nature of 'passive' safety system is that the laws of physic…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety goes through the a list, but basically you have active vs passive designs based on a range of features. Generally, passive safety refers to the primary loop.

A nuclear battery can be 100% passively safe for decades but they don't produce a lot of power. A pure passive system that's producing 1GW of electric power is producing 2.5GW worth of heat. Which is really hard to dump into the environment passively without connections to external systems. In the event of a tidal wave your pipes to and from the sea are likely blocked which means there is some pool that is going to boil.

Even cooling tower designs often actively cool the tower through the use of water curtains. It's not needed but significantly reduces costs. Now, that that is building up the internal passive designs starts to reduce power. But thus only operates over a range. Further it is going to produce as close to 2.5 GW of heat as it can.

So, now there is no external pool or connection to the sea and here is where you see problems.

PS: Which all comes back to passive designs costing more and being less efficient. Sure, it 100% passive is possible physically just not economically viable.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#650

Post by inimino »

niels_olson wrote: post #548
inimino wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people lose faith and trust because of the accidents, or does it just uncover existing perspectives? From a rational perspective, people should lose faith in technology when it spactacularly fails, or rather, we should prefer sober risk assessment over "faith" in the first place. I'm just not sure about the political capital argument.

The problem is that people take the accidents as reasons to retreat into pre-scientific beliefs in gods and goblins. One step forward, two steps back is still a step back.

Gods and goblins? Are you being metaphorical?

When things that were assured to be perfectly safe blow up, people tend to distrust the people who said they were safe. I think the pro-nuclear side faces extraordinary skepticism at this point, and not unreasonably so.

The problem with nuclear is that we don't have the perspective yet to know the risks. Maybe in a couple hundred years we will know the actual costs of the installed nuclear capacity we have today, but all we have now are projections, and we know how easy it is for humans to be overoptimistic.

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