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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

#271

Post by stale2002 »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #136
loeg wrote: post #128

Earlier 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.

Ok, so what you are saying is that you would prefer to live next to a dirty coal power plant that is much more likely to cause you to get cancer or other horrible health effects?

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

#272

Post by stale2002 »

bhntr3 wrote: post #66
noobermin wrote: post #30

I'm pro-nuclear fission (full disclosure, I work on fusion related research, but I don't care about who wins more than I want society to win), but I think talking to any random person in the public who are already skeptical about fusion, to them fission has not had a great track record. Make as many arguments you want to make about fukushima facing a natural disaster, w/e, and how the field has advanced since three-m…

> the public is skeptical regarding fission for good reason: history has not been kind to the kind of disasters fission reactors have wrought. It's not just that! I was pro-fission until someone educated me how horribly irresponsible we've been about our nuclear waste disposal. And how dangerous it is. Deep waste storage has been deadlocked in government since the 80s so waste is just hanging out by each reactor. If…

The answer to the nuclear waste "problem" is that it doesn't matter.

If we took all of our nuclear waste, and put it directly into our food supply, this would be a better situation than what we are in now.

This is because of just how horrible coal is. Coal kills millions of people. Would taking our nuclear waste and feeding it to children cause millions of deaths? I think that's unlikely. Which means that it isn't as bad as coal.

Opposing alternatives is the same exact thing as supporting the status quo. Unless the alternative also kills millions of people, then it is better than what we have now.

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

#273

Post by jabl »

labster wrote: post #215
roenxi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, what about mining fissile materials? I worked with Rio Tinto (mining corporation) for some time, and happened to know a few people in management positions at the Ranger Uranium Mine. I can assure you it was one of the most environmentally conscious operations the group was managing, and super-senior management seemed to take the whole thing very seriously. It was a source of much frustration, because as a compa…

This is what I love about HN, instant access to experts in the field, so we don't have to argue our assumptions. I guess it's unsurprising that uranium operations run a lot cleaner than fossil fuel extraction, given the politics involved. I'm not against fission power itself, but being in California makes me kind of a NIMBY on the issue. All you need is somewhere with water and without active fault lines, and nope, n…

Uranium vs fossil fuel exploitation is also a density & economics issue. Since the energy density of uranium is several orders of magnitude higher than for any fossil fuel, one can afford to be much more pedantic about uranium mining without wrecking the economics.

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

#274

Post by OscarCunningham »

gwbas1c wrote: post #222
captainbland wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might just be right that if renewables can't meet current demand, prices go that bit higher to keep usage in line. It's not a given that we must consume as much as we do (or more) forever given the finite nature of the planet and everything.

That really hurts the crowd that lives paycheck to paycheck. Price goes up: someone goes without.

But why not redistribute money, and let people choose what to spend it on, rather than having a separate system to distribute each individual resource?

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

#275

Post by eeZah7Ux »

ggm wrote: post #157
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The table is extremely misleading by not estimating risks for the next 100,000 years.

You're right great Cheops, king of kings, we should stick to bronze swords, the next 100,000 year risk profile of iron smelting hasn't been drawn up yet. Nobody in any environment or endeavour in history applies 100k years risk assessment on any activity. This is green fundamentalism and next comes mandatory veganism and forced sterilization.

Nice series of strawman and ad-hominem.

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

#276

Post by ksec »

_nalply wrote: post #263
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never mind coal, nuclear is safer than even wind and solar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities The problem, as you point out, is that people are generally very bad at understanding risk.

Future mortality seems not to be considered but I am afraid this is important. Numbers will be difficult to obtain, you know, clairvoyance is not easy. But at least we know that we need to maintain nuclear waste for a long time. Or we create deep subterranean disposal sites, and this will be dangerous work. Coal is probably even a lot worse because of climate change effects. Renewables seem to fare better for future…

I thought one of the advantage with Bill Gates solution is that their reactor uses those Nuclear Waste as fuel rather than creating more out of it.

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

#277

Post by jabl »

addicted wrote: post #220
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.

Most nuclear renewable energy competitors are cheaper than nuclear. Sure, nuclear provides baseload energy in a way its cheaper competitors cannot, but as long as you have more than 20-30% fossil fuel the baseload is not really a concern anywhere. It seems foolish to divert money intended to reduce polluting sources of energy into the more expensive nuclear alternative, until the share of coal and natural gas is low…

It's a question of path dependency. A least-cost grid with 80% less GHG emissions than current will likely be, depending on the location, lots of wind and solar, improved transmission, a little bit of batteries and demand response, and then NG backup.

For a deep decarbonized grid (95%+ less emissions), the least-cost will OTOH likely involve a rather high fraction of nuclear, plus a somewhat smaller fraction of the aforementioned wind, solar, transmission, demand response, batteries on top.

Dealing with climate change requires a deep decarbonized grid. So while most grids can take a lot more wind and solar than currently, if we overbuild those sources we can get locked into higher emissions long-term.

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

#278

Post by kd5bjo »

stale2002 wrote: post #267
toomuchtodo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By refusing to support an alternative solution, you are supporting the status quo. It is easy to bring up problem after problem with alternatives. It is not easy to show why the status quo is somehow better, because it is not. A death is a death. Someone dieing because they fell off a roof is equally as bad as dieing due to radiation.

‘toomuchtodo is supporting an alternate solution: taking measures to reduce the rate at which solar installers fall of of roofs.

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

#279

Post by hoaw »

ip26 wrote: post #217
hoaw wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To succeed with large project you generally have to develop competence in-house first to know what you are doing. Today it is quite unpopular, at least in western countries, for the government to do that. When things become more accessible, it doesn't necessarily mean they become simpler. In fact there is often added complexity. It isn't just nuclear power plants, but all kinds of infrastructure.

It feels like we couldn't build the goddamn interstate system today, and you can't tell me that's due to a lack of pavement-laying competence.

Laying pavement itself is likely a very small part of building an interstate system, in terms of success. Though, I am sure there are e.g. cities that can barely do that. I mean, whenever I see a video from the US the streets always seems broken, at least in cities. Large projects today seems to fail even before any actually manual work is done.

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

#280

Post by theshrike79 »

Jedi72 wrote: post #250

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.

So does burning coal, and that shit gets everywhere.

Nuclear waste is well contained and can be secured for hundreds of years easily: https://www.npr.org/2011/02/02/133399514/into-eternity-nucle...

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