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Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

nytimes.com

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Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#121

Post by pfdietz »

threeseed wrote: post #119
jjordan wrote: post #58

Generation III+ reactors are orders of magnitude safer than everything else that was built before the turn of the century. China is actually leading the charge right now, with AP1000 reactors under construction. One of the plants just went live last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.

The only way to make nuclear reactors affordable is to build lots of them. And nobody wants to build lots of them because in most countries nuclear is extremely unpopular and there are issues with disposal of waste.

No, the reason people don't want to build lots of them is because there are much cheaper alternatives.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#122

Post by yongjik »

est31 wrote: post #84
ianai wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.” just that is all I need to know to prefer nuclear to coal.

You shouldn't just count deaths and conclude that a nuclear catastrophy isn't that bad. Far more people had to evacuate their home, having to leave most of their belongings behind. And most times with no or too little compensation. Sure, nuclear is prefferable to coal but that doesn't mean that both shouldn't be gotten rid of.

I couldn't find a definite number, but the total number of people who evacuated are somewhere around 100-200k. (Every source has different numbers because the zone kept changing, I guess.)

Meanwhile, coal emission kills ~1M every year, or ~100k every month. (I guess the numbers are just an order-of-magnitude estimate, so take them with a grain of salt.)

So, during the month of Fukushima disaster (the second worst nuclear power disaster in history) it displaced a few times more people than coal killed in that month.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#123

Post by timthorn »

istjohn wrote: post #22
addicted wrote: post #15

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…

FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to…

> In 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm

I think Windscale would count amongst such accidents, too.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#125

Post by DATACOMMANDER »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

If you want to see if an environmentalist really believes that climate change is as bad as scientists say it will be, look at their stance on nuclear power. If they are against it, they are basically denying the seriousness did climate change. There is no way you are going to convince voters that they need to cut their energy usage, especially before the worst of the climate change effects are felt. You need to provi…

Interesting that this is being downvoted, since it’s spot-on.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#126

Post by godelski »

istjohn wrote: post #22
addicted wrote: post #15

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…

FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to…

Two points:

1: France is 75% nuclear and has some of the cheapest electricity.

2: there are a ton of small reactor designs that would be substantially cheaper and quicker to build. Problem is that you can't get them out of research labs.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#127

Post by lstodd »

est31 wrote: post #104
TomMarius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that kind of reactor is never going to be built again - its design was very outdated and outright bad. Today we can build reactors where any failure that would result in an explosion of any kind is physically nearly impossible.

Maybe we won't build those reactor types any more. But they are still operational, and this is what matters. There is a huge incentive in keeping them operational as the major cost of nuclear energy is building the reactor. Already built reactors don't incur that cost any more so they make loads of money for their operators, especially when they are old and "mortage free". Due to this gigantic incentive, every politi…

There are 11 still in operation, and heavily modified to not allow anything like that thirty-year old disaster.

If this bullshit cloud over nuclear got dissolved they'd be replaced with much more safe design. Instead they are forced to continue operation because nothing new can be built. Because of unfounded fears.

That's what caused the Fukushima disaster. No new plants - no decommisioning of old plants - old plants blow up.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#128

Post by scarygliders »

Can we just get something straight about the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant?

Although it was a 1960's design, the reason it failed the way it did was because of one design flaw...

Its backup generators were not placed up on the hills above it. Rather, the backup generators were situated below sea level underneath the reactor buildings. DERP.

Fukushima Dai-ichi survived the Magnitude 9 earthquake. It did not survive the tsunami because said tsunami overcame the tidal wall in front of it, and then the backup generators got flooded. But for that one event, if the generators were placed up on higher ground, the outcome would have been so much different.

I have first-hand knowledge, due to..

1) Knowing the area. I lived in my Japanese father-in-law's mountain house, situated 1.5km out of Miyakoji-machi, Tamura-shi. That town was just inside the 20km evacuation zone from the power plant, the mountain house was just outside at 21km - myself and my family lived in our own house in the outskirts of Koriyama city.

2) My (now deceased) Japanese father-in-law was president of the Hitachi subsiduary company which built Fukushima Dai-ich No.4 reactor, which wasn't operating at the time of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami but did suffer an explosion thought due to hydrogen gas from the spent fuel situated in the Spent Fuel Pool in its upper level.

3) Mentioned in point (1) above, I owned a house in Tobu New Town on the Eastern outskirts of Koriyama city, and I was working at Flextronics in Koriyama at the time the M9 quake occurred - things got a tad 'exciting' at the time. I should write a book.

My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account - in Fukushima Dai-ichi's case, for some reason (possibly financial?), it was decided that the tsunami barrier was sufficient (it wasn't) for the job, and at some point in time it was decided that placing backup generators underneath the buildings was sufficient - that unfortunately did not turn out to be the case :/

And lastly, I still fully support the idea of nuclear power.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#130

Post by lstodd »

timthorn wrote: post #123
istjohn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to…

> In 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm I think Windscale would count amongst such accidents, too.

Then you'd have to count all the accidents on every scientific and military reactor, not discounting naval reactors and especially in the early times, up until ~1975.

Can I remind you that that's almost 60 years ago and we're not talking about military?

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