Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by hueving » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

datenwolf wrote: post #163

mikeash wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the sources of CO2 for mining and all the rest? If it's electricity production then you're basically blaming nuclear for emissions from fossil fuel generation, since those would be much lower in an all-nuclear world. If it's transport then it's more justified, but when looking at how it could be in the future, transport can be electrified to close that loop.

It's mostly due to the chemistry required to liberate the Uranium from the ore. What you have in the ore is mostly Uranium oxides. You have to strip away those pesky oxygen atoms in order to further process the Uranium. And in that process quite the amount of CO2 is produced. Now keep in mind that this must be done to all the Uranium, before it undergoes enrichtment. So for every atom of U235 you get about 200 (give…

How is that compared to mining for battery and solar material? It's a double standard to hold nuclear accountable for manufacturing when the same is not applied to solar/wind.

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

#202

Post by bmcusick » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

Ctrl+F "Solar", "Wind". No matches found.

That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't they be on the list?

Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do pretty well. They don't kill anyone from air pollution and global warming, but manufacturing and maintenance isn't risk-free. When you install things on roofs, sometimes people fall off.

Most solar installation these days however are utility scale deployments in empty fields. It's pretty low risk, plus the same pollution and AGW benefits that nuclear benefits from.

As an aside, I wonder if anyone has done the math on storing high-level nuclear waste on the Moon, now that a fully reusable SpaceX Falcon Heavy is almost here. That might be cheaper than the financial and political costs of places like Yucca Mountain.

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

#203

Post by ricw » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

The quoted statistics are interesting, but irrelevant when it comes to the actual use of nuclear. Furthermore, why are solar and wind energy missing from these stats? They account for 90% of new power in Europe in 2016 [1], and I'd assume similar for the major world economies. I'd like to know who funded this study. It screams of nuclear industry backing...

For anyone still being in disbelief of nuclear being made obsolete: Why has not a single (!) private insurer been willing to fully insure a nuclear facility without government backing?! The reason is simple: the risk is too high, even for insurance companies worth billions.

TLDR: nuclear has, as yet, not worked using private financing.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/09/new-ener...

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

#204

Post by mikeash » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

datenwolf wrote: post #163

mikeash wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the sources of CO2 for mining and all the rest? If it's electricity production then you're basically blaming nuclear for emissions from fossil fuel generation, since those would be much lower in an all-nuclear world. If it's transport then it's more justified, but when looking at how it could be in the future, transport can be electrified to close that loop.

It's mostly due to the chemistry required to liberate the Uranium from the ore. What you have in the ore is mostly Uranium oxides. You have to strip away those pesky oxygen atoms in order to further process the Uranium. And in that process quite the amount of CO2 is produced. Now keep in mind that this must be done to all the Uranium, before it undergoes enrichtment. So for every atom of U235 you get about 200 (give…

What part of that process produces CO2? I'm reading up on it but everything I find gives a fairly simplified view of things. The chemical reactions discussed on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_hexafluoride) don't involve any carbon, but maybe it's from some secondary aspect?

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

#205

Post by galacticpony » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

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.

Major tsunamis in Japan aren't rare at all, they've occured multiple times in the past century. They also don't happen to follow a fixed time schedule.

If a built you a house, following all the protocols for safety, right next to an active volcano, would you consider it safe?

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

#206

Post by dfox » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

padseeker wrote: post #166

vkou wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The world's available hydro resources are nearly tapped. 2. Hydro power generation is only second to coal in the number of people it killed. [1] 3. Hydro power generation is complete hell on the environment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...

Those are all valid points. But why were they skipped over? Why was solar and wind skipped over? It barely mentions them, pretends that they don't exist.

Solar, wind and hydro are energy sources that depend on weather and cannot be regulated except by throwing the generated energy away, thus with today's energy grids cannot be used as majority of the generating capacity. On the other hand biomass can be stored and used according to demand.

Pumped storage is in the grand scheme of things horrendously inefficient in essentially any metric one cares about (energy efficiency, capacity per size, capacity for cost...).

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

#207

Post by yusyusyus » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

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…

Some differences between the airplane analogy and the nuclear plant analogy:

1) When a plane fails catastrophically, the impact is limited to a smaller geographical area.

2) Pollution from the failure of a plane doesn't involve what is estimated to be a century-long endeavor to cleanup.

3) The toxicity from plane failures do not invade nearly every facet of life, making entire areas unlivable.

I am not a proponent of nuclear energy because we do not have a way to handle the full lifecycle, including failures. We will have this someday, but the idea of "well throw this waste into a rock formation somewhere and hope it doesn't cause a problem because it takes hundreds of years to handle" is just not reasonable. Even today, the Hanford site in Washington is leaking radioactive shit into the Columbia River and there is no estimated date to complete this cleanup.

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

#208

Post by wbl » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:21 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #197

Before Chernobyl blew up, nuclear energy proponents promised us, nuclear energy was safe. When Chernobyl blew up, it was obviously a stupid Soviet design, with stupid operating personnel. But now we've got new reactors, they are safe! Nothing could ever happen! Then Fukushima blew up. That was obviously okay, because it was a Tsunami in conjunction with a few other improbable acts, and we obviously can't expect the n…

How many people died in all of those? Now compare to the particulate pollution coal releases, which would force evacuation of neighborhoods if we treated them as nuclear plants.

The US Navy has operated hundreds of reactors for decades 24/7.

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

#209

Post by ThrustVectoring » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:21 PM UTC

all_usernames wrote: post #179

lmm wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's natural amounts of radiation that people are exposed to. Taking a commercial airline flight or handling a banana are good comparable measures - if it's less than those, it's not really worth worrying about.

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

#210

Post by CydeWeys » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:21 PM UTC

bmcusick wrote: post #202

Ctrl+F "Solar", "Wind". No matches found. That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't they be on the list? Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do pretty well. They don't kill anyone from air pollution and global warming, but manufacturing and maintenance isn't risk-free. When you install things on roofs, sometimes people fall off. Most solar installation these days…

I'd be surprised if the biggest source of injury from solar wasn't from installers falling off roofs.

You can't count all of those injuries against solar itself, though, as roofing injuries will happen regardless, and putting up solar panels greatly extends the life of a roof, so the amortized total injury to installers doesn't go up as much.