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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

#341

Post by cxseven »

hueving wrote: post #201
datenwolf wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that the full environmental cost should be known in all cases, but I hope you expect that the bias is somewhat justified by the fact that uranium functions as a fuel while solar and battery materials are multiple-use.

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

#342

Post by graphitezepp »

jsonne wrote: post #320
Koromix wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. [...] I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert…

I'm no biologist or scientist of any sort, but it seems this is a problem with all apex predators to some degree. You get to the top of the food chain by adapting to and being highly reactive to short term and catastrophic risk. Once you get there you have to do a 180 and suddenly be highly attuned to subtle and long term issues to stay there. It's simply a different skill set and frame of mind.

The way humans tend to overvalue short term gain and underplay long term consequences is well covered. This line of thinking bleeds heavily into politics and how our societies organize. Would like to know if it is actually an apex predator thing, it might just be part of being a mortal animal.

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

#344

Post by moomin »

ronald_raygun wrote: post #316
moomin wrote: post #255

I'm something of a fan of nuclear power, but there's no way it's safer than a solar panel array. Ah, they didn't include renewables. Colour me surprised.

Renewables solve a different problem though. There aren't great ways of storing energy on a large scale. So you end up needed two components to a grid - a baseline that you can scale up whenever (coal, natural gas, nuclear), and a renewable component. Saying that nuclear is the safest in regards to a baseline energy load is a valid argument to make.

That's a valid argument. The one in the article misses out that rather important nuance.

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

#345

Post by scaryclam »

pps43 wrote: post #225
wbl wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is not how many people have died, but how bad the impact can be. Even if nobody dies, the need to evacuate a large city like New York or Tokyo because a nuclear power plant nearby underwent rapid unplanned deconstruction might easily wipe off all economic gains from the nuclear energy, and then some.

As opposed to...the entire planet being affected, like it is with fossil fuels?

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

#346

Post by ThinkBeat »

The discussion I have seen so far on this thread go something like this:

1. Nuclear is really safe. The best. 2. Someone brings up an incident that actually happened. 3. Apologists excuse the incidents that happened because a. It wasnt designed right b. It was due to corruption c. It was bad planning. etc.

We live in the real world here. You dont prove nuclear is safe by excusing every accident and actually using the disaster to prove how safe it is.

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

#347

Post by livingparadox »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #336
payne92 wrote: post #13

I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…

The problem with nuclear goes back to the beginning. The original reason for nuclear research, and even the first reactors, was to breed bomb material. Nuclear power was an extension of "atoms for peace" which was originally political cover to continue weapons programs. Some commercial reactors are secretly used for this purpose even today. Nuclear may have a bright future but it's extremely difficult to cleave energ…

Do you have a source for your claims?

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

#348

Post by martinald »

mikeash wrote: post #318
martinald wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. Germany is having to do this right now - hitting 30-40% and it's really expensive.

Because they apparently didn't anticipate this and now have to retrofit the equipment. If you're building out new stuff, you don't have to retrofit.

Yes but little to no new stuff is getting fitted with this when installed outside of Germany. It significantly puts the price of installs up. You have to dump the power somewhere and it's not cheap/easy to.

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

#349

Post by thaumaturgy »

beat wrote: post #258
scottLobster wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breeder reactors have been around since the dawn of nuclear energy and are extremely efficient, re-using the bulk of harmful waste material as fuel. If we built more of those waste would be far less of a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet suppo…

Nobody builds breeder reactors (except for generating weapons-grade materials) because they are seriously unsafe . I'm not anti-nuclear, but the idea of using breeders for civilian power generation is lunacy. There's a very good reason no one does that. The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that…

I was a big fan of the idea of Thorium reactors years ago, until I found one of the reasons they aren't being actively pursued. I don't see it mentioned but briefly on Wikipedia, but there are really serious engineering challenges around the corrosiveness of the fuel. Take all the properties of normal salt, add fluoride, make it radioactive, and then make it really hot.

There are materials that can handle it, but they are expensive and IIRC they still need to be replaced regularly. Imagine having to replace most of the plumbing in a reactor every decade or whatever number of years.

The engineering challenges don't stop there, but that was the one that made me go, "Oh, ok, I get why they aren't being taken seriously yet." Our materials science just isn't advanced enough yet.

On the plus side, China may be pursuing them more seriously: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_prit...

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

#350

Post by deepnotderp »

padseeker wrote: post #187
payne92 wrote: post #13

I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…

What do you mean "politicization"? Please saw the movie the China syndrome and then 3 mile island happened. Then people were very afraid. These were real possibilities. Does anyone want to live near a nuclear power plant? Do you? I sure as hell would not. How can you twist fear of a disaster in "politicization"? You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was being discussed about the ris…

Compared to a coal plant, yes.
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