Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 731 posts

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

#201

Post by icelancer »

pfdietz wrote: post #77
OisinMoran wrote: post #25

If this interests you, I would highly recommend reading this article on molten salt reactors [0]. TL;DR: Molten salt reactors are safer (can't have a meltdown if it's already melted), smaller (could fit on the back of a truck), able to run on more abundant materials like Thorium (which in turn come from more politically stable regions), and to top it all off: not only do they leave much less nuclear waste, they can a…

The advantage of MSRs is not that they can't melt down (or that they could use thorium; that's vastly overhyped), it's that there's no volatile material in the containment building. The containment of a LWR has to be large because it fills with radioactive steam in an accident. It has to be able to contain this steam, which means at least a certain amount of structure to withstand its pressure. But MSRs don't use wat…

> By that time, renewables will have marched down their experience curves to an economic position that will likely be unassailable.

You're posting this and statements like it all over this thread without a lot of supporting evidence that indicates very strong probability of it happening. Hacker News currently has a highly-ranked article on the main page regarding how there are massive battery and energy storage problems, and this particular issue is raised weekly here and in the news.

Why are you so optimistic that seemingly significant blockers will be for sure eliminated in the short decades to come?

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

#202

Post by icelancer »

ern wrote: post #191
Lramseyer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to downplay the issue, but global warming is a much more urgent issue. It's expected to cause far more disasters a lot sooner than any potential disaster from our nuclear waste. To answer your question more practically though, our nuclear waste would fit into a building the size of a football field. There's even a proposal to put it in some mine/cave in the western United States.

I would be pro-nuclear except for the waste problem. I don’t trust humanity to be able to confine the waste for centuries. For all we know it could be seen as some sort of “treasure” by future, ignorant, civilizations, dug up, and spread around in trinkets. If there is a way of permanently and completely removing them from the biosphere, I’d change my mind.

...if the alternative is climate change continuing to worsen until renewable technologies (particularly energy storage and transmission) are up to par and scale, which one do you prefer?

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

#203

Post by icelancer »

viach wrote: post #74

Nope. If we build 100x reactors, there will be new reasons why it's not enough already and we need 1000x more. There are unspoken and unpopular things that could really work - limiting consumerism, and decreasing population.

> limiting consumerism

If you solve this problem, you'll solve a problem much greater than energy consumption. This is not unspoken and unpopular, it is thought to be impossible given the human condition.

> decreasing population

Good luck with that one.

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

#204

Post by hokuem »

sampo wrote: post #148
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…

> clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers What is the fastest, new renewable power capacity any country has at any time build, in added W/year/capita? In both nominal and actual power generation? Or the fastest you can see or hope will happen in near future? Sweden built 10850MW nuclear in 20 years from 1965 to 1985. This means about 68W per year per capita. How do the alread…

I looked quickly for fun, and Quebec/Newfoundland built 22855MW hydro in 20 years from 1971-1991: http://www.hydroquebec.com/production/centrale-hydroelectriq...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Falls_Generating_S...

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

#205

Post by jhayward »

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…

If you keep comparing nuclear to coal, you have declared yourself the loser.

You have to compare nuclear against the best alternative, not the worst. This is just kindergarten-level debate.

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

#206

Post by jhayward »

godelski wrote: post #126
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…

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.

France is phasing out its nuclear fleet and plans to have retired 1/3 of it by 2025.

Its only new NPP under construction, Flammanville, is 9 years over schedule and over 300% over budget. It is still not certain when it will open due to safety defects that are still being evaluated.

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

#207

Post by wiggler00m »

Renewable energy is cheaper than nuclear, or will be imminently.

Proponents of nuclear tend to ignore the long-run costs associated with nuclear (eg. waste transport and storage), and the potential for cost blowouts due to acute disasters like Fukushima (estimated cost to taxpayers: USD $100 Billion).

The fact tax money is going towards Fukushima highlights another problem with nuclear power: the agency problem. The individuals and organizations that planned and built Fukushima are not directly shouldering the full cost of the problem it created. You can extrapolate from this to many other problems and risks associated with nuclear power, because the timeframe is long relative to the life of a human. If the average human lifespan was 200 years or more, maybe this would be less of an issue, but as it is now, profits now will inevitably trump responsibility tomorrow (and by tomorrow, I mean 30+ years from now).

There's also the risk of weaponization, which increases as the number of plants increase, particularly if those plants are built in countries which currently do not possess much technical nous. It's not a technology that should be disseminated, because the risks are real, and catastrophic in their consequences. If this sounds paranoid, Warren Buffett had this to say about the threat of cyber, biological, nuclear, or chemical attack on in the US:

"“What’s a small probability in a short period approaches certainty in the longer run. (If there is only one chance in thirty of an event occurring in a given year, the likelihood of it occurring at least once in a century is 96.6%.) The added bad news is that there will forever be people and organizations and perhaps even nations that would like to inflict maximum damage on our country. Their means of doing so have increased exponentially during my lifetime. “Innovation” has its dark side.

There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk. If an event occurs in the U.S. that leads to mass devastation, the value of all equity investments will almost certainly be decimated.

No one knows what “the day after” will look like. I think, however, that Einstein’s 1949 appraisal remains apt: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”"

[Source: 2016 annual letter to Berkshire shareholders]

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

#208

Post by sanxiyn »

pfdietz wrote: post #97
DennisP wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day. Wind/solar is only that much cheaper if you ignore storage. Stop ignoring the possibilities of much cheaper nuclear and things look different anyway. South Korea is already 6X cheaper according to the article, and some GenIV designs are likely to do even better.

South Korea's numbers lack transparency, and I believe they assume very low interest rates (that is, they socialize the financial risk.) Is there a POSSIBILITY of much cheaper nuclear? Sure, anything is POSSIBLE. Is it LIKELY? Experience says "no". And surely it's not possible in the US right now. Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? The SMR companies are not in…

> Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy?

There actually is a simple solution: follow UAE and let Koreans build standardized APR-1400.

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

#209

Post by abtinf »

rorykoehler wrote: post #195
abtinf wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post makes it sound like Fukushima failed in a catastrophically unsafe manner. I think it’s important to be explicit about the casualties that resulted from the disaster. The death toll currently stands at... maybe 1. A plant worker died of lung cancer in September 2018–over 7 years after the incident—and the government thinks it might have been caused by the plant.

200k people were displaced

And over a thousand people died due to the evacuation. Every one of those deaths is the moral fault of generations of anti-nuclear fear mongers who created the atmosphere of paranoia.

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

#210

Post by gruez »

rladd wrote: post #177
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…

The only reason there are commercial nuclear power plants in the USA is because their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant by the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... ). Without that law there wouldn't be any. The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the craz…

>their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant [...] The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong.

Is there a reason why coal powerplants which emit pollution (known to cause lung cancer) as part of normal operation aren't liable? It seems like the legal system punishes catastrophic failures, but something like slightly increasing the rate of cancer doesn't get any punishment because the damage is so spread out and not worthwhile to prosecute/sue. Given this, I would argue that coal power plants also have their liabilities "artificially limited".

Post reply on HN