Would building a reactor underground not be safer?
Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
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Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#142Why complicate things when we already have a non-polluting eternal source of fuel in the sky, AND the technology to harvest it, AND it's actually economical and uncontroversial, AND the available energy is orders-of-magnitude more than needed today?
Hmmm. PG&E wouldn't have to worry about 100,000 miles of transmission lines if power-generation could be decentralized. Oh, wait, it can be! And without paying for 10,000 years of security.
Of course it won't make anyone rich or powerful, and it's decentralized, and those are bad things. Apparently.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#143Where's the actual data on safety to people of nuclear vs coal vs wind/rain/sun?
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, coal is even worse than nuclear. So let's have neither but renewables instead :). Compared to europe, the USA is a big country and it is also further in the south which means more sun for solar collectors.
Hang on, are you absolutely sure that renewables are less damaging than nuclear? The footprint for nuclear is tiny, it might be competitive. Fukashima was a level 7 nuclear distaster, so that is as bad as it gets. The actual damage done is objectivly not that bad compared to a lot of things we have accepted in the past with only increased safety regulation (like dam failures). 2 lvl 7 accidents in 35 years; and desig…
> Renewables need materials, which are mined
So, what about mining fissile materials? How clean is that, particularly with regard to tailings and wastewater?
Are there any studies out there without a bias on this? I mean, it's okay to be biased against coal, any non-metallurgical uses really put the "fossil" in fossil fuels.
But I know there are all sorts of weird edge cases. Like we're going to want to continue to collect and burn hydrocarbons that we collect from landfills, since the methane is so much more potent of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We should continue to burn that. Hydropower will continue to be a happy side-effect of flood control.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather live "next to" nuclear than coal. (Neither of these are built abutting residential neighborhoods, so "next to" is a bit of a fallacy.)
There is an idle plant near San Diego they've been wanting to open for a long time but the residents in surrounding areas fight it tooth and nail. For a changebof scenery, residents in Nagasaki are fighting an ongoing battle (losing but trying) to shut down the plant in the area. I have yet to hear of other cases but so far it seems people living in the vicinity of nuclear plants are not happy.
It’s at the southern tip of Orange County, not that far from both San Diego and Los Angeles, and there are millions of people nearby. It has been closed for about 7 years, and the claimed risks/fears seem plausible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that's fortunately increasingly an option we can take, but the world would sure suck less if we weren't dealing with the compounded effects of 50-70 years of the sort of nuclear skepticism expressed in your comment upthread. But still, even if we're going to aggressively build out renewables there's still room for a lot more nuclear in the energy mix. There's use-cases for it where solar, wind etc. isn't a subst…
Are you willing to live next door to a nuclear plant? People don't experience coal related problems unless they live in areas that are heavily polluted. Sure it impacts them and everyone else but it's perceived less harmful.
I can see Seabrook Station from here, and there are houses within a mile of the reactor. The popular beach towns of Seabrook and Hampton beach are within two miles. AFAIK, neither my neighbors nor the tourists give it much thought.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#147Three serious problems with nuclear, globally: - too slow. Break ground now and you'll be producing energy by 2030. - political instability. Hands up who supports the switch of Iran and Saudi Arabia to nuclear? It would reduce a lot of carbon emissions. Let's not overlook Ukraine either: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurenuclear-plants-i... - budget instability: Wylfa has stopped https://www.independent.co.…
Budget instability isn't precisely what is stopping anyone from building a nuclear power reactor, it's that when all costs are accounted for it is simply not cost competitive anymore, and certainly not in 10 years when it's actually going live and there have been a bunch more iterations of solar and other alternative energy source growth.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
The major problem is that it will take twenty years to build a power station - look at Hinkley Point Power station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
That doesn't seem like an argument against it? I mean, if fission is the best base load (and I'm not saying it is, I don't know) but it takes 20 years to get approval for a fission plant, seems to me like you do some modeling and planning and then you start building.
By the time you've built your nuclear powerplant germany will have phased out coal by 2038 and people are already complaining that this timeline isn't aggressive enough.
For the price of one nuclear powerplant you could have built 3 nuclear powerplants worth of energy storage this year and over the next 20 years the price of energy storage will drop even further which will make it economical without any subsidies.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#149Nuclear energy sounds great to me except for the disposal of nuclear waste. I cannot seem to find any convincing references that we can do it safely over the long-term. Can someone help me with that?
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#150Why complicate things when we already have a non-polluting eternal source of fuel in the sky, AND the technology to harvest it, AND it's actually economical and uncontroversial, AND the available energy is orders-of-magnitude more than needed today? Hmmm. PG&E wouldn't have to worry about 100,000 miles of transmission lines if power-generation could be decentralized. Oh, wait, it can be! And without paying for 10,000…
Are you forgetting about the change where all new homes in CA have to have solar panels? We already are moving towards mass adoption of solar, that doesn't stop us from exploring other options that work in less sunny places, at night, etc. Solar won't work everywhere.