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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

#451

Post by Retric »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #392
Retric wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. This resulted in huge subsides, but also a lot of export controls. You can't say that about the internet. PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.

"Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons." Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plut…

In terms of manufacture, I agree. Further, Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years so we don't currently need anything in the way of production. So, yes direct production was mostly from dedicated reactors.

However, the lack of reprocessing beyond simple plutonium exaction increased the demand for uranium ore. This lowered prices and because waste was not reprocessed early stockpiles where created, even if they where not in fact used. So, the impact would have been minimal except the lack of innovative R&D calcified the industry around this approach.

Further, there was an actual attempt to extract plutonium from civilian reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj... was really a legacy of this failure as it only produced 4,373 lb of plutonium vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site which produced most of the US's plutonium for nuclear weapons. Which is why I feel this is a little more nuanced than your suggesting.

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

#452

Post by dangerlibrary »

oelmekki wrote: post #354
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…

This is a debate we have all the time, here in France, where we chose nuclear energy as main source of energy for several decades. Nowadays, everybody but lobbyists (because for those reasons, nuclear industry is strong, here) seems to agree renewable is the way to go (but we're far to be able to replace nuclear with renewable), mainly because: * we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lo…

You probably meant "exorbitant."

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/exuberant

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/exorbitant

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

#453

Post by frabbit »

As the article makes clear, this another technology that might be useful in the future, but is currently unusable thanks to the problem of the waste generated from it. There are no safe options for storing nuclear waste right now.

It really is time that we start looking at cutting back mindless generation and consumption of energy and that mostly means a big shift in lifestyle for North American and European consumers.

Either that or else you can all explain to your children and grandchildren (whom you love very much and would do anything for etc.) that you decided that living an hour's drive or more from work and commuting in every day while eating fresh dragonfruit and shrimp flown from the other side of the world was just fine.

Reduce. Re-use. Recycle. Time to start actually working on the first of those.

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

#454

Post by slackingoff2017 »

pm90 wrote: post #442
slackingoff2017 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand why this would have any effect on domestic nuclear power production in the nations that already have nuclear weapons. Probably the most important question: why don't the US and China get more of their domestic power from Nuclear? Also, I need to some source for the claims that Atoms for Peace was meant as a cover to transfer nuclear technology. I believe the program was created as a way to provide…

TRIGA type research reactors, probably the most popular model, are specifically designed to be "pulse reactors" that can produce rapid power spikes of 20,000+MW. I don't see how you could argue that the main purpose isn't simulating nuclear detonations.

Same with Sandia Z Pinch machine and NIF. It's all dual purpose tech to simulate bombs since actual testing isn't done anymore.

You won't find anyone that says it outright but the government interest in pulsed power is awful suspect.

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

#455

Post by okreallywtf »

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…

This is the thing I don't get about nuclear proponents. While I'm not an opponent, we can scale sustainable energy sources now, we could have a Manhattan project type of program that, while costly, could replace the majority of our energy sources as fast as we can manufacture the panels and turbines. There is so much lead time in building a nuclear plant, it costs so much and then continues to be pretty costly in maintenance.

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

#456

Post by [deleted] »

frabbit wrote: post #453

As the article makes clear, this another technology that might be useful in the future, but is currently unusable thanks to the problem of the waste generated from it. There are no safe options for storing nuclear waste right now. It really is time that we start looking at cutting back mindless generation and consumption of energy and that mostly means a big shift in lifestyle for North American and European consumer…

[deleted]

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

#457

Post by yodsanklai »

oelmekki wrote: post #354
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…

This is a debate we have all the time, here in France, where we chose nuclear energy as main source of energy for several decades. Nowadays, everybody but lobbyists (because for those reasons, nuclear industry is strong, here) seems to agree renewable is the way to go (but we're far to be able to replace nuclear with renewable), mainly because: * we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lo…

> renewable is the way to go

Everybody agrees with that. The question is whether we choose nuclear or coal during the transition to 100% renewable (if it ever happens).

> we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot

> you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant

I don't know if it's that bad. But again, is this worse than coal?

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

#458

Post by Animats »

It doesn't kill many people, because even when there's a disaster, there's time to evacuate. But you lose an entire city once in a while.

Major reactor disasters so far:

- SL-1. Steam explosion due to control rod lifted too far during maintenance. Small experimental reactor, built in the middle of nowhere (Idaho Reactor Test Station) for good reason. Inherently unsafe design.

- Three Mile Island. Meltdown due to cooling water failure due to instrument confusion. Contained by good containment vessel. No casualties. That's what should have happened at Fukushima.

- AVR pebble bed reactor. Pebble jam, radiation leak into ground. Contained, but too much of a mess to decommission.

- Chernobyl. Meltdown and fire due to operational error during testing. Totally inadequate containment. Entire region evacuated and contaminated for decades.

- Fukushima. Loss of coolant and meltdown. Containment vessel too small, reactor cores melted through in three reactors. Containment problem well known in advance; Peach Bottom PA has same design.

A big, strong, containment vessel can keep a meltdown from becoming a major disaster and has done so at least twice. Size matters; a large containment vessel faces lower pressures when all the water boils to become steam. But a good worst-case containment vessel can cost as much as the rest of the plant.

Some of the recently-touted small reactor designs try to omit a containment vessel on the grounds that their design couldn't possibly melt down. That's probably not a good approach.

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

#459

Post by MR4D »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #428
MR4D wrote: post #423

This is laughable. It's almost like saying that nuclear weapons are safer than sticks and stones because nuclear weapons have killed less people. Never mind that nuclear weapons have the possibility of making our species extinct. Likewise for nuclear power accidents.

> Never mind that nuclear weapons have the possibility of making our species extinct. Likewise for nuclear power accidents. Please elaborate. How can nuclear power plants make our species extinct?

A better phrasing would have been, "In a similar fashion", but I've answered it below as well.

A bad nuclear spill into the ocean of significant extent would kill our food supply pretty quickly. And if not "kill" it, it would definitely make it inedible. (Roughly 1 billion people depend on fish for their primary protein.)

A bad nuclear spill into the atmosphere (think a large Chernobyl) would have a devastating effect on human health as well.

Basically, the point I was trying to get across is that nuclear power has extreme tail risks that things like solar won't.

Sure, people will fall off their roof, but that is a distributed set of events, not a concentrated one like a nuclear accident.

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

#460

Post by logfromblammo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #175
sbarker wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)) g…

That's good calculation there, but the number we're concerned with is the amount of ∆v that the spacecraft has to generate itself. If you just get close enough to the sun, a spacecraft could use the solar wind and solar magnetic field to shed more velocity, until it is close enough to aerobrake in the sun's atmosphere.

Once you're out in the Oort cloud on the way out, you can't exactly deploy a solar sail to get another push (unless you make it impractically large).

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