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Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

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Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#171

Post by flubert »

zackmorris wrote: post #80
cjsuk wrote: post #14

Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do. So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.

I live in Idaho, and something that comes up fairly regularly is whether to accept more nuclear waste shipments to be stored at the https://www.inl.gov indefinitely. To me, nuclear power is not good or bad (it just is), but I have a very low level of confidence that humans can manage it over the long term. Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years.…

> Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years.

The "Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982" charged utilities a 0.1 cent/kwh fee for disposal of nuclear waste, and the DOE was supposed to take receipt of that waste. There is $31 billion in reserve for waste disposal...

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1059999730

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#172

Post by lispm »

nnfy wrote: post #151
lispm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy was politicized from day minus one. It was developed out of government driven military technology. In day zero nuclear energy was set up by politicians: goals, strategies, financing, deployment, risk handling, etc. Everything was coming from energy politics. Investments were directed and the market&regulations for nuclear were set up. Government largely financed it and insures it. The large scale, the…

Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...

> In the last century there have been eight tsunamis in the region with maximum amplitudes at origin above 10 metres (some much more), these having arisen from earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 to 8.4, on average one every 12 years. Those in 1983 and in 1993 were the most recent affecting Japan, with maximum heights at origin of 14.5 metres and 31 metres respectively, both induced by magnitude 7.7 earthquakes. The June 1896 earthquake of estimated magnitude 8.3 produced a tsunami with run-up height of 38 metres in Tohoku region, killing more than 27,000 people.

This risk needs to be addressed. That many people were killed by a tsunami is a catastrophe. But one would also like to have a stable energy system that does not go down like that and creates a huge problem (financial, technological, human, ...) for several decades.

The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption. Reactors were claimed save, which in a single event were totally wrecked. We are not talking about a single problem, but multiple problems (failing electricity backups, failing outside electricity, exploding buildings, ...), design mistakes (fuel is difficult to reach) and problems generated by running these reactors (like the amount of spent fuel on-site which needs lots of electricity for cooling).

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#173

Post by athenot »

padseeker wrote: post #91

This is the year 2017 - This article deliberately skips over any consideration to Wind, Solar, etc. What kind of BULLSHIT excuse for journalism and scientific study is this? Who in the nuclear industry paid for this? I only read the first 3 paragraphs but I can already tell you this article is not worth your time. The article compares the statistics of energy sources, but all of the charts focus on fossil fuels. This…

Wind and solar are interesting sources of energy, but in the grand scheme of things, they still represent a tiny fraction of power production, and the article noted that on the onset.

BUT should you account for them, nuclear is still the safest, as according to this list†, solar, wind and hydro still carry higher deaths per quantity of energy produced.

    SOURCE              DEATHS PER PWh
    ——————————————————— ——————————————
    Hydro (global)	1,400
    Wind (UK)
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#175

Post by JumpCrisscross »

sbarker wrote: post #45
cjsuk wrote: post #14

Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do. So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.

We should shoot the waste into to sun.

It's actually easier to leave the solar system than it is to hit the sun.

(Earth orbits the sun at 30 km/s [1]. That means you need -30 km/s of ∆v to kill the energy we're born with. The escape velocity for our solar system from Earth's orbit, meanwhile, is about 42 km/s [2]. So you just need 12 km/s of ∆v to skip town.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_orbit

[2] sqrt((2 * 6.7E-11 * 2E30) / (150 * 10^6)) given G~6.7E11 [a], mass of the sun is about 2E30 kg [b] and the Earth orbiting the Sun from about 150 million km [b]; for escape velocity [c]

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant

[b] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/LeonVaysburd.shtml

[c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#176

Post by merpnderp »

ebbv wrote: post #123

Oh great another pro-nuclear article that focuses on deaths and ignores the long term costs of spent nuclear fuel and the damage that inevitably happens in disasters like Fukushima. Before Fukushima the story was the same as this "Nuclear is the safest! Nuclear is the best! Problems of the past are gone!" Then Fukushima happens and the nuclear industry continues its same message. Give me a break. Solar and wind are o…

How many people have died from the Fukushima accident? How many people died mining coal for your local power plant?

And solar and wind need nearly as much power generating capacity in natgas plants (or in Germany, dirty coal plants), driving up costs and even more deaths through fossil fuel mining.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#177

Post by ZeroGravitas »

kzrdude wrote: post #148

At the same time, it wasn't predicted that solar power would be this viable, was it?

I've seen claims that the price decline has been predicted since the 1970s, since almost all products get better when built at scale and that Germany and China have both put government action into place based on these long term trends.

Combined with carbon tax type modelling of coal's emmissions which would massivel raise it's cost if accounted for, I'm not sure it's that unexpected.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#178

Post by merpnderp »

yellowapple wrote: post #97
anotherbrownguy wrote: post #52

Isn't nuclear hysteria created mostly by American CleanTech industry? Solar is not a reliable source to begin with so you can't use it to power anything critical. It has to be combined with something like nuclear or fossil fuels to have reliable power. But if we go nuclear, we will have 1000s of years worth of power. So, where exactly does Solar fit in?

Solar doesn't have to be reliable; it just has to charge a battery (or some other means of energy storage) which is reliable. Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.

A very expensive battery made from a material we likely don't have enough of to scale for the world.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#179

Post by all_usernames »

lmm wrote: post #138
y4mi wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

until it doesn't and it does. i'm sure that its safe to dump small amounts of radioactive material into the oceans, but if you start to build more reactors and dispose of all the waste into the ocean, the dilution will soon cease to be enough to offset a global ... disaster.

Nope. Unless we start importing uranium from off-planet, there just isn't enough material to make the whole planet significantly radioactive.

What does significantly radioactive mean? If I am a single individual, a single particle of Cesium or whatever could give me cancer. It's not an averages game when you're talking about real lives.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#180

Post by Recurecur »

simias wrote: post #64

People are scared of nuclear energy for the same reason that they're scared of taking an airplane. Even though it's technically and statistically very safe, the perceived risk appears much greater. In particular in both cases when something goes wrong it tends to go extremely wrong and you're completely helpless to stop it. In contrast getting in a car accident or slowly suffocating in coal power plant emissions seem…

New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown. LFRs include an electrically cooled salt plug that seals a holding tank. If power fails, the molten salt melts the plug, and the fuel safely drains into the tank. I particularly like ThorCon's concept, where the reactor is underground. Another plus of this reactor type is that water cooling isn't needed, so siting is much more flexible.

Note that the ThorCon design can use uranium or thorium as fuel. ThorCon estimates it could be shipping reactors in ten years, and could produce 100 GW worth of reactors per year, at around three cents per KWH.

http://thorconpower.com/

I suggest watching the video on this page, it gives a good perspective:

http://thorconpower.com/news

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