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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

#241

Post by wallace_f »

dragonwriter wrote: post #208
wallace_f wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior US advisors 'rarely if ever admit this' lesson, but it was also demonstrated when Libya gave up its nukes: https://theintercept.com/2017/07/29/dan-coats-north-korea-nu...

Libya never had nukes to give up.

Quote from the article:

>The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes … is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”

This quotr misled me. What I found from another source is that they had a nuclear weapons program according to another source 'likely to develop a nuke in 3-7 years'

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#242

Post by acidburnNSA »

chemmail wrote: post #141

Would building a reactor underground not be safer?

It would be safer, as the pathways of radionuclides into the biosphere would be more torturous. It would also be significantly more expensive, as underground construction is big money. Many new reactors put the core below grade, though. It's better for tornadoes, but worse for floods.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#243

Post by AlfeG »

qaq wrote: post #87
pjc50 wrote: post #59

Three 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.…

? In light of Ukraine there are way bigger concerns than distance from conflict zone to nearest Nuclear power station. Ukraine voluntarily gave up one of the worlds largest nuclear arsenals in exchange for what now everyone can see worthless security promises from the remaining nuclear powers. This will be last time any country gives up Nuclear weapons and I bet it will result in way more countries getting into the g…

There is a great problems with Zaporojye Nuclear. It on "planned" repairs for years. Some blocks work several days a week.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#244

Post by pimmen »

est31 wrote: post #92
avar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we've got right now is on the order of a million people dying prematurely every year because of the human issue of people worrying too much about concentrated risk (nuclear) and not understanding the diffuse risk (coal). Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.

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.

Some people die every year from wind and hydropower [1]. If we measure lives lost per unit of energy, nuclear power is orders of magnitude better than wind or hydropower.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#245

Post by philipkglass »

krastanov wrote: post #236
Retric wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costs are the real issue not worker safety. The trucking industry kills lots of people and nobody saftyreally cares. So, it’s really a straw man argument about non issues. Really, I would have no problem with Nuclear if it was cheap, but nobody can get it to be cheap (not even China) even without the need to load follow. We need cheap power and supplemental load following / storage. But, Nuclear is simply well behind…

Skimming the first Google result for amortized cost, nuclear seems cheap: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/electri... However, I do not have good enough background to vet the source well. Are they missing something obvious? Also, I was not talking about worker safety, rater about everyone's health, from the miner to the person living near the power plant.

Were you looking at production costs instead of levelized costs? That page notes "A new nuclear power plant, for example, has one of the highest levelized costs, particularly compared to coal and natural gas-fired plants, and its costs are exceeded only by certain renewable plants, such as offshore wind and solar power, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA)."

Another issue is that the page is from 2012 and its numbers for renewables, solar PV in particular, overestimated costs for 2017. Solar PV costs declined much faster than the EIA estimated.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#246

Post by VyperCard »

eigenvector wrote: post #184
roenxi wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, saying that renewables are the cause of this is the same as saying that nuclear is the cause of Chernobyl. Are you suggesting SA renewables suffered an unplanned failure this summer? I havn't heard anything about that and I expect that they have been functioning as expected and that you are mistaken. Do you have a source?

What I'm saying that is the loss of system security events that have occurred in Australia this summer are not inherent to the operation of the grid with high renewable penetration, but rather a failure of the system operator to plan adequately for foreseeable system conditions and contingencies, just like Chernobyl was not an inevitable occurrence linked to the underlying technology. So using the SA load-shedding ev…

Just get good forecasts then energymeteo.com

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#247

Post by VyperCard »

pimmen wrote: post #244
est31 wrote: post #92

Earlier 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.

Some people die every year from wind and hydropower [1]. If we measure lives lost per unit of energy, nuclear power is orders of magnitude better than wind or hydropower. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

So far..

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#248

Post by VyperCard »

briandear wrote: post #170
est31 wrote: post #92

Earlier 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.

Do solar farms and windmills harm birds? How many birds are killed each year compared to how many die from nuclear? The flippant “lets do renewables” ignores that plastering the landscape with windmills and solar panels has some significant effects on wildlife that would exponentially increase with more widespread deployment. How many birds have died in France as a result of nuclear power? Perhaps the answer is to no…

Cats kill magnitudes more..

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#249

Post by pimmen »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #175
strainer wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even while you dont include deaths involved in construction and ongoing security required by nuclear plants, those deaths-per-Wh-so-far figures do not represent risk, which is much more complicated. Its not possible to fully insure nuclear plants - because no company can take on board liability for disasters which nuclear is demonstrably capable of but fortunately have avoided to date, with considerable expense on sa…

Thank you. Whenever I see someone compare nuclear deaths to solar deaths (lot of solar death are falling off a roof), I slap my forehead when they suggest full speed ahead with nuclear (despite it being too expensive, uninsurable without government backing, and no waste disposal plans) instead of...making it harder to fall off of roofs when installing rooftop solar.

We allow cities close to the ocean even though the Japanese tsunami damages cost more than ten times as much as the nuclear accident it caused. We allow cities on fault lines as well, even though earth quakes could kill hundreds of thousands of people.

What does ”uninsurable” mean? If nuclear power plants are uninsurable Silicon Valley is uninsurable.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#250

Post by Jedi72 »

Fission produces toxic waste. Thats just the fact. It takes thousands of years to become safe to handle. The idea that "we'll just bury it in the desert" is the same kind of short-term thinking that got us into our current ecological predicament.
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