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

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

#621

Post by ZeroGravitas » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 10:38 AM 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.

Solar at night is currently 10c (again it seems to be falling in price as more roll out), at least in places that have strong enough sunlight for concentrating solar:

https://www.thenational.ae/business/dubai-set-for-world-s-ch...

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

#622

Post by lispm » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 11:28 AM UTC

boomboomsubban wrote: post #620

lispm wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's another example of a reactor designed to produce electricity and plutionium. North Korea a;so operated a smaller 5 MWe reactor creating electricity for a town and plutonium for their weapons program.

It's a reactor designed to produce large amounts of plutonium. Any reactor produces some amount of energy, nuclear reactions are famous for their energy creation.

> It's a reactor designed to produce large amounts of plutonium.

It's a dual-use reactor: plutonium and electricity production (200 MWe).

> Any reactor produces some amount of energy

But not electricity. For that a power plant has also turbines, generators, etc., ...

The US for example had no electricity production in the early reactors for Plutonium production.

But the US Hanford N produced both Plutonium and electricity for the commercial grid for 21 years...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Reactor

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

#623

Post by guscost » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:46 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #606

guscost wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source about Fukushima containment failures? I've not heard any confirmation that primary or secondary containment structures failed at any point during or after the meltdown. The latest reports seem to indicate that primary containment is intact at all three reactors. As usual, you have to read between the lines - these editors always seem to hate nuclear power, or love fear and chaos, or both: https:/…

If the containment had held, there would have been no radiation release outside the plant. Moderately detailed description: [1] More detail: [2] [1] https://www.livescience.com/13271-containment-breach-fukushi... [2] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...

> If the containment had held, there would have been no radiation release outside the plant.

This is not how it works. Containment structures prevent the actual core materials from exiting the reactor, since those are heavy metals with high radioactivity and long half lives. The latest reports suggest that the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) in Unit 2 is likely breached, but this is inside the primary containment vessel (PCV).

In both the Three Mile Island and Fukushima incidents, radioactive steam was vented to the atmosphere. Additionally at Fukushima a breached pressure vessel probably leaked radioactive water into the primary containment vessel. This water was pumped out (into spent fuel storage, I think). I've also heard concerns that the spent fuel pools were feared to be leaking into the ocean, but so far as I know that hasn't happened enough to cause alarm.

The radiation inside the containment structure where the Unit 2 RPV breached is really high, "dead in a couple hours" levels. Outside the reactor buildings (the red dots on the map in your second link) background radiation levels didn't rise any higher than the natural background radiation in parts of Kerala, India, and in several other places around the world. Much higher than normal for Japan, sure, but nothing dangerous. Those levels can be explained by the Iodine and Cesium isotopes in the vented steam.

Calling these happenings a "containment failure" is disingenuous at best. The 50-year-old containment structures at Fukushima appear to have done exactly the job they were designed to do, after a magnitude 9 earthquake no less.

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

#624

Post by Recurecur » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 2:21 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #491

eli wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, some people would therefore conclude we'd all be better off focusing on ways to get around that don't involve driving...

That's a perfectly valid and logical conclusion, and indeed there are many big companies you've heard of (including Waymo, Tesla, Uber, and many conventional auto manufacturers) who are working on precisely that. Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be.

"Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be."

You have it exactly backwards. Manually operated nuclear plants will evolve into fully automated, completely safe designs. A very similar approach to self-driving cars.

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

#625

Post by Recurecur » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 2:29 PM UTC

jbg_ wrote: post #383

outworlder wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical. No. Modern reactor designs are actually designed in a way that makes it difficult to maintain the reaction. If you are not actively maintaining it, then it will stop on its own. This is opposed to the most common existing designs, where you need to expend effort to…

> This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways. So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.

> So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.

I didn't say anything about "completely eliminating the possibility of failure". I said "completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown" which is in fact correct.

ThorCon plans on operating the plants about 100 feet underground, which will even mitigate a deliberate attack with an airliner. There is no way to make anything absolutely, 100% safe, but this approach is mighty close.

That is in contrast with fossil fuel pollution, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year.

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

#626

Post by beat » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #575

okreallywtf wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been discussed ad nauseam, we need 1) storage, 2) smarter grids (which we need anyways). Of course there will have to be investment but what better investment could there be? We get 1) jobs, 2) cleaner air, 3) to keep living and have future generations able to live as well or better than we did.

> This has been discussed ad nauseam Then why are you claiming that you do not understand it? Yes, there are potential mitigations but there are major engineering concerns with large scale storage. You say that we can scale solar today but the reality is we can't yet. Nuclear is sustainable energy that we can scale now without additional concerns about also scaling energy storage. That's why people are interested.

I think we'll be able to solve the storage-grid engineering problems and scale solar faster than we would be able to scale nuclear. Nuclear is expensive to build.

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

#627

Post by freeflight » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

ogoffart wrote: post #612

freeflight wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption. Not just the Japanese nuclear industry, Tihange 2/Doel 3 Nuclear Power Stations are sitting right in the middle of Western Europe and they are another catastrophe waiting to happen. These reactors pressure vessels have serious issues with micro-cracks in their steel and at this point, it's not certain their structural integrity can actually be guaranteed…

New inspection tools showed micro fissures. The power plant was stopped as a precaution. Then further investigations showed that these have always been there and are not evolving. It was safe all along, that was a false alarm. The power plant is then restarted. Still extra security measures are set, just in case. To me this just shows that the security is taken seriously. Why is the public opinion so scared about suc…

> Then further investigations showed that these have always been there and are not evolving. It was safe all along, that was a false alarm. The power plant is then restarted.

Sorry but that's plain and simply wrong, you are vastly misrepresenting the situation and chain of events.

These micro-fractures are not part of the design and they are evolving [0], documentation of the manufacturing can't be found and it's assumed the manufacturer made them vanish on purpose to hide the fact that cheaper materials had been used to build, leading to the fractures.

These reactors have been controversial for years, they've been taken offline and online many times to look for new fractures and they keep finding new ones, fractures which shouldn't even be there in the first place.

It's amazing how you try to turn this into an "everything is safe, there's no reason to be worried, it was always broken!" even tho everything about this screams "you better be worried" and the neighboring German states (and the Dutch) are already hoarding Iodine tablets [1].

Even the Belgians themselves handed them out to their population, tho they used ISIS as a scapegoat at that time [2]

We are talking about the pressure vessel here, not some unimportant plumping part on some auxiliary system, and they just keep on watching as more fractures build up in there. Where do you think this is gonna lead? The warning signs can't get any worse than this considering these reactors are also running past their original life time.

[0] http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2017/06/new-crac...

[1] http://www.dw.com/en/north-rhine-westphalia-prepares-for-bel...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/28/all-belgian-resid...

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

#628

Post by beat » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

Regist wrote: post #593

beat wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you arguing that a solar/wind grid can't be done, or just that it's going to be challenging?

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

#629

Post by godelski » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 3:00 PM UTC

mSparks43 wrote: post #618

godelski wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thes…

From what ive read about nuclear technology, the reason the west has big non salt reactors is that they wanted them for making nuclear bombs. providing energy was a by product of making nuclear weapons. That also accounts for much of the delays, they are using the tech for so many naughty things they need to wait for staff turnover on the project so no one knows too much about what they are doing. So while I agree we…

> wanted them for making nuclear bombs

This was definitely a big part, but there's a lot that goes into it. Things like enrichment plants. The proportions of 235 vs 238 is substantially different in a bomb vs power plant. This is how we can tell what the Iranians are doing. So using big uranium plants is an excuse to make a lot of 235 and 239Pu.

But just because the past was focused on war efforts, doesn't mean the future needs to be. Many technologies transition from the military to public sectors. And I'm happy to see that talk about nuclear in the news more often, because I think this is the way to open up the discussion. Unfortunately, more people currently oppose nuclear[1]. And one of the most harmful things I see is that there is this idea that the tech isn't green. Because we don't have a battle of green vs nuke vs fossil fuels. It is really green vs fossil.

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppose...

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

#630

Post by okreallywtf » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 3:56 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #575

okreallywtf wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been discussed ad nauseam, we need 1) storage, 2) smarter grids (which we need anyways). Of course there will have to be investment but what better investment could there be? We get 1) jobs, 2) cleaner air, 3) to keep living and have future generations able to live as well or better than we did.

> This has been discussed ad nauseam Then why are you claiming that you do not understand it? Yes, there are potential mitigations but there are major engineering concerns with large scale storage. You say that we can scale solar today but the reality is we can't yet. Nuclear is sustainable energy that we can scale now without additional concerns about also scaling energy storage. That's why people are interested.

But we can't really scale nuclear, not in any kind of reasonable time frame. Take this for example [1], billions of dollars and decades to finish. Nobody thinks there won't be a transition period where we have to use existing coal, natural gas and nuclear but in terms of what we should be investing in right now, sustainable should be the focus I think. I have no issue with new nuclear plants where it makes sense, but it doesn't seem economically like it is actually that great of a choice given how expensive they are and how long they take to build.