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

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

#371

Post by beat » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:41 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #349

beat wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Ah, that makes sense. I've always assumed there's some powerful technical limitation, and it didn't seem to be in the reaction itself or the availability of fuel.

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

#372

Post by logfromblammo » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:41 PM UTC

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…

I don't want to live next to a nuclear power plant, but I would be fine with living near a dozen of them.

You see, that higher number implies a greater infrastructural and economic investment. Further, the sole large power plant in an area is automatically a military target, whereas if the same capacity were split across many facilities it becomes impractical to attack or control them all.

I'd love to see each municipality in the US above a certain population own and operate its own small reactor, using it to power the municipal utilities. But I do have a bit of a problem with a federal agency operating the only nuclear reactor in a 100-mile radius. It just ends up managed differently, becoming a political power center in addition to an electrical power center.

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

#373

Post by pil4rin » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:42 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #369

Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses. Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or be…

Not to mention not having some nuclear waste to store for the rest of the foreseeable future.

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

#374

Post by adrianN » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:42 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.

How concerned are you about cosmic rays?

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

#375

Post by ugh123 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:43 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #366

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar prices in the sunniest regions have already dipped below 3c unsubsidized, and are projected to keep falling for decades to come, even without any major technological breakthroughs. So aiming for that price 10 years out, with a new design isn't a very good sign

What are solar prices like in the night? /s Renewable are all nice and good, but currently we're still building fossil fuel power plants all over the world. It would be better if we instead built nuclear plants. Expanding renewables and nuclear are not opposites of each other.

>What are solar prices like in the night? /s

Is that a rhetorical question? Because night time usage largely relies on battery storage for which economies of scale are also reducing the cost in a similar predictable fashion.

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

#376

Post by dijit » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

As a person who actually likes nuclear energy:

The issue I have with Nuclear is that we have not managed to fix the waste issue, and nobody seems to want to talk about it.

I'm not a huge fan of "salting the earth" for 10,000 years.

And when you say "it's safe", you're inherently ignoring that you basically have this toxic waste that is too costly to shoot into space and too dangerous to keep anywhere on earth for 10,000 years where it wont eventually harm the ecosystem.

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

#377

Post by khedoros1 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

lispm wrote: post #211

nnfy wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good" design is ill defined. The fact that a design is riskier than an alternative does not immediately make it worse. Especially when safety can be engineered to arbitrary standards with enough money.

> Especially when safety can be engineered to arbitrary standards with enough money. There is not 'enough money'. If a reactor shows cracks in the steel in critical places, preventing this upfront might not be technologically possible and afterwards repairing might also be so expensive, that it economically makes no sense. The big problem: if there is a technical problem, it is politically a very tough decision to cl…

I live pretty close to the San Onofre Nuclear station. They made some upgrades planned for 20 years of operation in 2010, and ended up shutting down the reactor due to premature wear in 2012, and are now planning to decommission the station. I'd be more worried about the financial concerns as an excuse to continue operating an unsafe station if I wasn't seeing the opposite happening in my own back yard right now.

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

#378

Post by tehabe » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:47 PM UTC

One thing is simply missing from the piece. You can't really distinguish between the civil use of nuclear power and the military use.

Maybe there is some reactor design which can fix this but the reactors which are currently being build are not those designs. Also they are build for 60+ years. A lot can happen in 60 years.

Discussing an energy source just by pointing about future developments is not the answer. The EPR reactors in Finland and France are several times over budget and took much longer than planed to build. In the time you could have build wind turbines and solar cells all over the country with an equivalent or higher amount of power output. And according to the current statistics every added kilowatt would have been cheaper than the last one.

Also you might now say, but solar and wind are not always available. But at the same time you think that all problems with nuclear can be overcome but not the storage of electricity?

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

#379

Post by mitchty » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:47 PM UTC

pil4rin wrote: post #373

beat wrote: post #369

Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses. Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or be…

Not to mention not having some nuclear waste to store for the rest of the foreseeable future.

What is the rest of the forseeable future exactly?

If we use breeder reactors we can get the half life down to 500 years which is easily dealt with via stuff like glass entombment.

The current nuclear waste solution is ignoring a lot of advances from the 90's.

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

#380

Post by EADGBE » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:48 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #107

EADGBE wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think you're just spitting out numbers. Where are you getting these numbers? Particularly the cow one (deliberate killings only). Generally intrigued. > yet people jump in cars like it's routine. It is routine. Time spent driving is much, much, much higher than time spent swimming near sharks. So... My brain understands that if I refused to go skydiving, then I can not die from a skydiving accident. Which is…

ABC has an article about the killer cows (which cites data from the CDC, though I've yet to find the data): http://abcnews.go.com/Health/shark-versus-cow-deadlier/story... British cows are apparently similarly deadly: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cows-official...

Thanks for pointing this out.

Whoa, now I'm very concerned about snails.