A great documentary about this is "Pandora's Promise". In it quite a few previous sustainable energy (wind, solar) advocates lay out the problem: sustainable has too far to catch up and in order to get the developing world to high quality of life they need high energy consumption per capita fast. Only solution to this is a safe version of nuclear.
Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
631–640 of 679 posts
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#632Sure its safe when you dump all your waste in another state. If your state that created the nuclear waste had to keep it, it would be a different story.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#633Sure its safe when you dump all your waste in another state. If your state that created the nuclear waste had to keep it, it would be a different story.
>Sure its safe when you dump all your waste in another state. If your state that created the nuclear waste had to keep it, it would be a different story.
The article says safest, not safe. And if we compare nuclear waste to carbon dioxide emissions, which actually pollutes more worldwide?
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 vesse…
From "Report by the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Association":[1]
Confinement of radioactive material and control of radioactive releases
As a result of the damage to the reactor cores in Units 1–3, large amounts of steam and hydrogen escaped the reactor pressure vessels. This, in turn, pressurized and heated the primary containment vessels. These vessels were breached and steam, hydrogen and other gases, together with radioactive material, were released into the reactor buildings and eventually to the environment. The primary containment vessels of the reactors had not been designed to withstand the pressure that could be generated in a severe accident; because of this, venting systems had been installed in the 1990s [22, 23] to limit the pressure in the containment vessels in the event of an accident. There are indications that the primary containment vessels for Units 1–3 failed at various stages in the progression of the accident. This was the result of the pressure and temperature in the primary containment vessel rising to levels that were far in excess of their designed capability before venting could be implemented (see Section 2.1). The leakage of radioactive material from the reactor cores was partially mitigated by the suppression pools, which retained some of the radionuclides released from the reactor pressure vessels.
That should be clear enough.
The radioactive water problem is huge. It was not "pumped into spent fuel storage". Several large tank farms were built to store it, along with a processing plant to remove radioactive solids. Some of it did leak into the Pacific Ocean.
[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1710-Report...
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And now you're seeing a shift to smaller satellites with shorter operation lifetimes, and in lower orbits. This allows for use of off the shelf hardware and faster iteration. The barrier for this was brought down because it is cheaper to send hardware to space and the idea of a cluster of small sats isn't crazy anymore (because you need many satellites to provide continuous service to a specific ground location when using LEO).
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear energy was politicized from day minus one. It was developed out of government driven military technology. In day zero nuclear energy was set up by politicians: goals, strategies, financing, deployment, risk handling, etc. Everything was coming from energy politics. Investments were directed and the market®ulations for nuclear were set up. Government largely financed it and insures it. The large scale, the…
Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.
So is it really economically at that point? Is developing, prototyping and building a next gen reactor worth the money? Do we even know how much it would take to account for other 1-in-100 year risks? Is it worth it over better solar/wind? Even this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/alphabet-...
I think the answers are clearly, no, no, no, and fuck no. We should be spending money on better solar, wind, having a distributed energy grid, and fusion. Not on a technology that is equivalent to diesel at this point, and something that will kill us.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's not irrational to prefer probabilistic, long-term problems to maybe once or twice having to evacuate new york or tokyo
i dont think climate change is considered probablistic anymore.
no, but the impact of something like, reducing coal by 10% and increasing nuclear by 10% is. the advantage is a slight reduction in emmisions and a slight increase in the possibility of a severe nuclear disaster. that's certainly a debate to be had, but one side isn't "more rational" than the other.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 electr…
>But not electricity. For that a power plant has also turbines, generators, etc., ...
Yes,but if you don't do that, you're just wasting energy. The US realized that, which is why they added electricity generation to the N Reactor. Both were still designed to create plutonium, and would not be built without the aim of nuclear weapons.
It's like saying we grow the same corn for the edible part and for biomass. While technically true, the edible part is driving the production.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 vesse…
From "Report by the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Association":[1] Confinement of radioactive material and control of radioactive releases As a result of the damage to the reactor cores in Units 1–3, large amounts of steam and hydrogen escaped the reactor pressure vessels. This, in turn, pressurized and heated the primary containment vessels. These vessels were breached and steam, hydrogen and o…
> These vessels were breached and steam, hydrogen and other gases, together with radioactive material, were released into the reactor buildings and eventually to the environment.
Exactly what I described in less alarming words. Steam, hydrogen, other gases, and "radioactive material" (Iodine and Cesium in the steam) are not the same thing or anywhere near as dangerous as actual melted fuel and corium escaping containment. Conflating this with the idea of molten core materials breaching containment is extremely irresponsible.
I'm not entirely sure about the radioactive water situation, and it sucks to hear that it may be worse than I thought. Do you have a source confirming the extent of contaminated water that ended up in the ground or ocean? It's really hard to find anything unambiguous here, tons of stories about "leaks" but many of those reports are actually about leaks into the reactor buildings. As far as I can tell a very large number (trillions?) of becquerels went into the Pacific Ocean right around the time of the tsunami, and since then no water outside the reactor complex has been measured with radiation levels outside regulatory limits (although they've been pumping groundwater collecting in the basements into big tank farms, like you said). It does look like the large volume of water pumped into the ocean initially (to make room for contaminated core water in the spent fuel pools, like I said) may have accumulated in bottom-feeding fish near the site. And it looks like there may be water from the site leaking into the ocean at some rate (although not enough to make any ocean water unsafe to drink). Other than that all I can find is an enormous volume of noise and fearmongering.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#640It 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 cool…
Coal occasionally destroys entire cities too. Ever heard of Centralia? I'd honestly rather move to Fukushima or Pripyat than there. And that's ignoring the economic devistation coal left behind.
I'd never heard of that until now. Extremely interesting.