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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

#591

Post by godelski »

mSparks43 wrote: post #569
godelski wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually how the industry as a whole thinks. I like to think expert advice, especially on difficult to understand concepts (hey, we're talking atomic physics here), should be held with more credibility than the layman. I work in a related industry, part of which is in space radiation mitigation. If you have any real questions about disasters I'll be happy to answer the best that I can. But forgive me if it ap…

How would you balance the two? From my experience "most" industry is ~10-20 years behind research. That's how long it takes to work out the kinks, be that mobile phones, cloud computing or AI. So while the US and Europe mess around spending stupid money on ITER the Chinese will be rolling out molton salt reactors leaving the west behind, and that 'sucks'. But these are big projects, running them like a Turkish ticket…

So there are certain aspects that can be be iterated upon faster than others. Something like shielding is going to be faster, and can be iterated upon, compared to something like the main reactor. That may also be because that's what I'm more familiar with.

I am also in favor of more small reactors, vs fewer large reactors. I think this provides a higher safety level and ease of upgrading. Plus you can just bury these entire reactors in the ground.

As for regulation, I agree that it should be strict. But the process needs to be streamlined so it doesn't take too long. That time is prohibitive to the technology (see the new reactor construction and it bankrupting Westinghouse). I don't have the answers to how you would optimize the system, but I think think we need to open the discussion up. Start asking questions like "Is covering the first $12b of damage reasonable for all reactor types and sizes?" "How do we ensure that a reactor type is ready to move from research to production?" And such. I don't think "let China test them" is a reasonable response either. The questions get brushed off because most of the public is still afraid of the technology (see this thread. I doubt many of HN users has worked anywhere related to this field, but look at how many have strong opinions). But the people that work in it have less fear. It is like working with anything dangerous, you have to always be aware of it, but that doesn't make it too dangerous to even handle.

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

#592

Post by toomanybeersies »

godelski wrote: post #525
jcranberry wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've heard (through two or three levels of separation), the regulatory agency on Nuclear power is stiflingly draconian. Getting any kind of new technology implemented is prohibitively difficult and expensive, which just adds to the list of disincentives in venturing into nuclear power.

Average time from final designs to shovel in the ground is about 10 years. So already your tech is obsolete by the time you start building. I do agree there should be TIGHT regulations, but there certainly is a limit. Also, it has a lack of subsidies, compared to the other sectors.

A nuclear power plant has a lifetime of over 50 years, so it pays to make sure you're doing it right.

It's like complaining that space probes and satellites use outdated processors and other computer technology. The Deep Space Climate Observatory was launched in 2015 with a 17 year old processor.

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

#593

Post by Regist »

beat wrote: post #408
hashmal wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear being safer than other major sources just means we shouldn't demonize it and stop everything right now out of panic. it means it's just an important asset while waiting for renewables to take off.

See my argument above, though... it's going to be faster and cheaper to replace a standard deviation's worth of fossil electricity with solar/wind than it would be to replace it with nuclear. So the "transitional power" argument doesn't really hold.

I have a hard time buying into this.

What's the lifespan of an solar farm with equal output to a nuclear plant? We're about to approve nukes for 80 year life spans.

Nuclear has super low operating cost and a long lifespan. The only real economic downside is how flipping expense they are to build and a major reason for that is we don't have much experience building them (because they've lasted so many decades).

You're also assuming that solar/wind will be faster when we don't have any real solutions for using those sources as a baseload. Storage and distribution is nowhere near being able to handle such demand. The cost of revamping our grid once those technologies do reach maturity is going to be staggering aswell.

Solar and wind are promising but they are still a __long__ way from being proven enough to gamble an entire energy plan on.

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

#594

Post by kbenson »

mikeash wrote: post #588
kbenson wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No source of energy is clean, in that respect. The best you can do is separate one time production and continuing operating pollution, and account for both. Using that to show pollution per Mhh at 5, 10 and 20 year intervals should be sufficient.

Reiterating my original comment, it would also be good to distinguish between the whole-lifecycle pollution generated now , with current electrical and transportation infrastructure, and the whole-lifecycle pollution you could achieve if you applied the "clean" technology to the whole lifecycle. For example, solar panel production requires a lot of electricity. That electricity is mostly generated from fossil fuels.…

An optimistic upper bound (unlikely but possible renewable adoption for material production energy), and pessimistic lower bound (current mix of evnergy for material production), and a best guess. That might convey enough information to give someone a good guess as to how things might turn out.

It starts to sounds complicated, and to be a lot of information to digest for a decision, but another way of looking at it is that correctly assessing and planning for energy needs in the future is so important that ignoring information like that when making an assessment is irresponsible. We need more nytimes.com style widgets that allow you to tweak the values to easily digest data like this, and that clearly reference where the data and assumptions come from.

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

#595

Post by acidburnNSA »

beat wrote: post #464
okreallywtf wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

I think a lot of the love for nuclear is technophilia, not reason. We love nuclear because it's hard , requiring exotic engineering and, yes, risk. There's a bigger sense of triumph in it.

I think people love it because you can get an average American's lifetime supply of energy from 1.5 soda cans of fuel and produce 3 soda cans of waste. And it's 24/7 reliable and emission free. That astounding energy density and associated tiny footprint is exciting all on its own.

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

#596

Post by acidburnNSA »

bmcusick wrote: post #260
m0skit0 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear "waste" can actually be used as fuel again, we just need to research that technology. You still need a lot more plastic and rare earths for solar and wind compared with nuclear (per watt). I think solar and wind are a good intermediate step but not for long-term.

Maybe. I saw a Google X talk a couple years ago from some grad students at MIT that wanted to build a nuclear power plant that closed the fuel cycle loop. (which is what you're talking about). They made some very grand promises about how this would solve the HLW problem. Unfortunately a few years later they had to issue a correction, because older (more experienced) engineered stepped in and showed them where the mis…

You're referring to the Transatomic 2-student company's claims that their epithermal-neutron molten salt reactor could burn nuclear waste as fuel without additional fissile feed stock. Professor Kord Smith and others pointed out their error.

However, that their whimsical concept didn't live up to its hype is no reason to claim that the closed nuclear fuel cycle doesn't exist. Breeding more fuel than you consume in an advanced reactor was proven in the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 near Arco Idaho in the early 1950s. The physical concept of breeding and closing the cycle is well-proven and 100% proven possible. No one debates this.

People do debate how much it costs vs. the status quo of just mining uranium. Uranium is cheaper than recycling spent fuel, so we mine uranium. It's that simple. If we decided uranium was running low and drove prices up, reprocessing waste would become more economical and more people would do it.

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

#597

Post by acidburnNSA »

beat wrote: post #417
mitchty wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Breeder reactors are ridiculously dangerous. There's a good reason nobody uses them except for weapons-grade material generation. They're also a major weapon proliferation problem, since it's easy to use them to generate weapons-grade material. Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?

The Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 on what is now the Idaho National Lab was the first reactor to demonstrate full passive safety in 2 related tests in 1986. In the first, they turned off all primary pumps and did not insert the control rods. The reactor shut itself down and established natural circulation decay-heat removal. This class of event (unprotected loss of flow) would melt the core of almost any other kind of reactor. Then they did a unprotected loss of heat sink to the same result. My dissertation advisor was there, and said that it was glorious. They knew that they had finally achieved truly safe, socially acceptable nuclear energy. Less than a month later Chernobyl happened and the advanced breeder reactors with their inherent safety have still not been developed commercially.

Breeders use low-pressure coolants with very high heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and boiling points so they can go to natural circulation easily at decay heat levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...

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

#598

Post by valuearb »

Retric wrote: post #513
Turing_Machine wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has about 200 warheads. The US has almost 7,000. The US has never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium, because they simply aren't well-suited for the purpose.

>never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj...

How did west valley produce power? Your link is unclear.

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

#599

Post by valuearb »

e12e wrote: post #562
hueving wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was developed out of government driven military technology That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.

It's a bit different when you use it for terrorbombing not one, but two cities - to make sure the design works. I guess you could argue that GPS has killed as many children now, by way of guided missiles and missiles fired by drones - but there's still a gulf between unleashing terror on a divine scale as a part of a publicity stunt and geopolitical maneuvering, to making warfare incrementally more efficient.

Given Hiroshima and Nagasaki likely saved at least a million Japanese lives, your point is unclear.

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

#600

Post by valuearb »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #385
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the Japanese use/used the crap out of nuclear. You'd think they of all people would want nothing to do with it. At the end of the day it's all about dollars.

The Japanese people do largely want nothing to do with nuclear energy. Opposition to it still triggers some of their largest scale protests in a country that does everything to shy away from this kind of unrest. But the political reality is that Japan is a client state of the US empire and the base of its operations in SE Asia. It's not functionally a democracy. The people who made money off of it were the alliance o…

You forgot their experience with Godzilla too.
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