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The Nuclear Option

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Re: The Nuclear Option

#171

Post by yongjik »

jabl wrote: post #105
sasavilic wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not convinced that it is a solved problem. How old are Egyptian pyramids? Yet there is a lot of stuff that we don't know about them. We are confident, that after 20 000 years, people will still know about nuclear waste storage facilities? Think about it: records could be lost, our language will be different. Why are we so sure that somebody will not dig it up?

The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially. After a few hundred years, most of it is gone, although there is of course the danger due to the chemical toxicity, just like any other heavy metal deposit. Obsessing over what could happen if somebody digs it up after 10000 years is not anchored in reality.

It's funny that people are so worried about stuff like Pu-239, which is stored miles underground in steel containers and will be half of what it is after 24,000 years.

Meanwhile, "According to a recent model study the total anthropogenic mercury released into the ocean is estimated to be around 80,000 to 45,000 metric tons" [1]. We have spewed so much mercury that people are advised to eat less tuna because they have too much mercury.

And mercury is not radioactive. In other words, 24,000 years later, there will be 100% of the same mercury there is now! (Granted, some of them might have been removed from the ecosystem and deposited deep underground... I mean, just like how plutonium is stored right now.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_pollution_in_the_ocean

Re: The Nuclear Option

#172

Post by agumonkey »

pfdietz wrote: post #168
agumonkey wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jean-Marc Jancovici, engineer in the energy field and pro nuclear, said that the math on renewable is bogus. And that if you don't want nuclear, money should be spent on energy saving measures like heat pumps and building insulation. I do understand how tempting are renewables, low risk, low entry cost..

If he's right, why are everyone + dog installing solar and wind, but hardly anyone is installing nuclear? Has there been a sudden massive decline in greed in the world?

Fad and clueless politicians. Govt gave credits for Solar and wind but apparently never did the math for other ways to save energy. Again nuclear is too risky politically...

Re: The Nuclear Option

#173

Post by pfdietz »

agumonkey wrote: post #172
pfdietz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he's right, why are everyone + dog installing solar and wind, but hardly anyone is installing nuclear? Has there been a sudden massive decline in greed in the world?

Fad and clueless politicians. Govt gave credits for Solar and wind but apparently never did the math for other ways to save energy. Again nuclear is too risky politically...

Really? Everywhere? There's tens of billions of dollar in potential economic windfall (so the pro-nuclear idea goes) to extract their share of graft from, and politicians are ignoring it?

No. You are providing the usual pro-nuke excuse, one that has become threadbare and sad as it's been repeated over the years. At this point, it's just ridiculous.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#174

Post by ShorsHammer »

usrusr wrote: post #88
ShorsHammer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there is big improvements in battery tech I don't see it as a solution. Lithium batteries have their own environmental problems and die after 10 years. Pumped hydro requires the geography, building new capacity tends to flood large areas and release huge amounts of greenhouse gases initially. Simply lifting weights on cranes or rail tracks is looking more efficient and can be adapted anywhere. It will probably…

> Simply lifting weights on cranes or rail tracks is looking more efficient and can be adapted anywhere. The energy density of that kind of scheme is a joke. Thought experiment: a fully charged Tesla, how often could it climb a hill the size of that crane if it skips recuperation on the downhill leg? That's how much lower the energy density of a crane storage would be. Pumped storage works (where the geography allows…

Since when was energy density ever been a problem for grid storage? Even in the most crowded cities on earth it's not a constraint.

Unless you are talking about portable applications it's all about round trip efficiency and cost, I'm not sure if you are getting confused about terms here or talking about an entirely different subject.

Compressed air efficiency isn't great. Using it for cooling lowers the efficiency even more.

Crane and rail gravity storage are pushing 80-90% round trip efficiency.

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789456

Re: The Nuclear Option

#175

Post by rurounijones »

dv_dt wrote: post #152
rurounijones wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can get the "We cannot build them in time" part but the whole "It is not economical to build them" strikes me as a pretty crazy position to take. Uneconomical compared to the massive disruption that climate change will bring to our civilization? Are we fighting to save our future or not? Discarding a proven technology that will massively reduce our carbon emission for an unproven "We still have problems to solve ar…

> "It is not economical to build them" strikes me as a pretty crazy position to take. Why, no matter what resources you allocate financially, if you have X dollars, you can do more and sooner with X building renewable sources than if you split it between renewables and nuclear.

Because that is based on the assumption that renewables and no nuclear is viable and going to work based on advances in technology.

I think there is enough debate in this thread to illustrate why that is not a universal position.

This comment explains it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19169073

Re: The Nuclear Option

#176

Post by PavlikPaja »

666lumberjack wrote: post #149
PavlikPaja wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no other resources depletable in the same sense - even if you burn coal or oil, equivalent resources can be synthesized. The rest is usualy not depleted in the literal sense, only put into use and may need to be recycled to be used elsewhere. But the elements used in nuclear fuel are completely destroyed in the process and there may be no easy way to recreate them.

Uranium and Thorium could be produced by nuclear transmutation in the event we discover some miraculous property they have ten thousand years from now. This is non-trivial, but it's essentially the process used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons and we managed to get pretty good at that.

I suppose recreating those would be much harder, because of the gap between them and the other elements.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#177

Post by 205guy »

michaelt wrote: post #116
205guy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense some cognitive dissonance here. You want that great carbon-free energy provided by nuclear, and you lament all the reasons it won't happen. Except you have no rebuttal to those reasons and almost sound convinced by their soundness yourself. - Politicians won't back nuclear because of the risk of accident, thus giving legitimacy to the risk and the public's fears. - There hasn't been adequate research and adva…

The reason politicians don't back nuclear is because of the way our political system operates. A politician might believe our nation will need more power plants within the next 20 years. But they're incentivised to do the thing that, relatively, will be best for their near-term re-election prospects. And just think of all the things that are better for their re-election prospects than a nuclear power plant in their c…

How are car-to-grid schemes any more unproven than next Gen reactors? You're not helping the side of science with untested hypotheses like that.

But my main point is realpolitik, or like you say "the way our political system operates." We have a political system that has evolved to handle issues in what we think is the least bad way (worst system except for all the others). Is nuclear in its blind spot, or would untested science-ocracy lead to worse outcomes?

Re: The Nuclear Option

#178

Post by 205guy »

kortilla wrote: post #98
205guy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense some cognitive dissonance here. You want that great carbon-free energy provided by nuclear, and you lament all the reasons it won't happen. Except you have no rebuttal to those reasons and almost sound convinced by their soundness yourself. - Politicians won't back nuclear because of the risk of accident, thus giving legitimacy to the risk and the public's fears. - There hasn't been adequate research and adva…

>Politicians won't back nuclear because of the risk of accident, thus giving legitimacy to the risk and the public's fears. No, that’s not the case. Politicians won’t back it because of their perceived risk based on their own ignorance. Or, even if they aren’t ignorant, they are focused more on staying in office rather than helping humanity so they don’t take up any projects that the ignorant public might pitchfork a…

See my point about realpolitik above. Politicians more or less reflect the people, for better or for worse. Politicians are also the leaders and deciders, if not them, who else? There is a healthy nuclear industry, lobby, and research, so it's not like nuclear is unfairly excluded from the solutions table. As others have pointed out, cost overruns have sunk many modern nuclear projects.

> real understanding/evidence

Well, where are they? I originally replied to trimbo's comment because he seemed to be pro-nuclear and scientific, but then all his arguments seemed to acknowledge that well, nuclear wasn't up to the task. So where are the rational arguments that nuclear can be a solution?

Re: The Nuclear Option

#179

Post by kortilla »

ben_w wrote: post #119
kortilla wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ffs, corona loss is only one small factor of transmission loss. https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po... Ignoring that major oversight, transmission lines aren’t free and they require upkeep so building/maintaining them across the ocean needs to be factored into your costs. It’s like claiming it’s cheaper to have sushi flown in from Japan everyday if you just ignore the air freight cost.

Yes that was a silly omission. However, adding resistive losses doesn’t change the conclusion because the margin is so large (it does make it much closer though). And this is ignoring that the line losses we see now are based on the most cost-effective designs for nation -scale grids, when one can straightforwardly (for example) use a higher voltage for lower resistive losses (no point reducing those losses further o…

If you have the power to just throw out costs as a concern, then we’ve had a solution for much longer. Geothermal.

>And we already have a lot of national scale grids, how hard is to join the existing ones together?

Very. We haven’t even managed to get the US on a national grid. To connect continents is just fantasy at this point. Do you realize the undertaking it would be to get 700kv line to Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, etc?

Re: The Nuclear Option

#180

Post by kortilla »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #154
kortilla wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s wrong. Debt markets are reflecting the risks of the plants being stopped by orgs like the NRC, etc. The debt markets don’t favor it precisely because so many different parties can block new builds.

I disagree with your assertion. It's simply time value of money. As an investor, you don't want to wait decades for a higher risk low return that may never materialize, or the bond defaults entirely because your nuclear plant is shuttered for safety or political reasons. Could government insure the bond? Yes! But then they're subsidizing nuclear when that money could go into renewables and storage.

You didn’t disagree, you just affirmed it. The debt markets treat it as high risk precisely because so many parties can easily stop it.

Nobody refuses to invest in nuclear because of the negligible meltdown risk.

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