Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by eMSF » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:09 AM UTC

eMSF wrote: post #138

pfdietz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, nuclear is sadly not a viable solution, due to cost. If nuclear were affordable it would be pushed through regardless of opposition. But it has just not worked out. The people with the money saw what happened at Vogtle and Summer (and also at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point). Those efforts to make nuclear affordable failed spectacularly, even with public and government support. Westinghouse and Areva were j…

Olkiluoto was not an exercise to make nuclear power affordable. The company was granted with a permission to build a single reactor, the first permit in decades, so they chose the most powerful one available, a first of its kind. With all the overruns, it has certainly proved to be an expensive build. However, it's all been done with private money, unlike the so called cheap renewables that cost the public hundreds o…

Hey, downvoter. You forgot to name yourself as to who we should look up to. In any case, I'll dedicate an extra litre of petrol for you -- hope it was worth it! (I hope you understand why you "greens" don't fare so well when it comes to elections -- you don't have a message to stand on!)

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

#212

Post by ern » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #202

ern wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a tough call, but I'd prefer pushing harder on renewable research or finding a permanent solution to the nuclear waste problem, because, as bad as humans are at dealing with medium term consequences of our activities (see climate change), we have no track record of dealing with the long term, and ultra-long term consequences of what we do.

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

#213

Post by madhadron » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

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…

> There is no way you are going to convince voters that they need to cut their energy usage

Indeed. Thus the question is what undemocratic institutions, can we use? Can we put in treaties that reduce national sovereignty like the TPP? Can we make it a second order or third order effect of regulations on how insurance works so that most people can't follow the chain back to the source?

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

#214

Post by kjar » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

This falsehood gets rolled out regularly. New reactors take a decade to manufacture, have nearly zero private investment, and the icing on the turd cake produce waste lasting for centuries.

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

#215

Post by mhermher » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

desuyone wrote: post #133

How about we put the reactors in the middle of the desert, then there is no danget of killing a city and no risk of nuclear material leaking into the sea. You really don't need that many people to staff a reactor and if you really do, you can always build a train so people don't need to live close. I know power transmission is an issue. But we have gotten a lot better at that as well, with things like that big DC und…

How about uninhabited islands. Access to plenty of water for cooling and away from population centers.

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

#216

Post by matt2000 » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #197

ajross wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable. Early reactors were hailed as paragons of safety too. Fukushima, remember, had a triply-redundant (or whatever) power supply to ensure that cooling power could be provided even in the event of a simultaneous meltdown and grid failure. Oops. I mean, look. It's... fine. Go nuclear. I agree with you, that these are probably safe designs and are probably…

> Fukushima, remember, had a triply-redundant (or whatever) power supply to ensure that cooling power could be provided even in the event of a simultaneous meltdown and grid failure. Oops. Yeah, and then they installed the backups below where the main plant was, rendering them completely useless. Oops. This was a human failure. Not a technological one.

Humans design technology, a technological failure is a human failure.

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

#217

Post by BurningFrog » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

wiggler00m wrote: post #207

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…

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

Renewable energy at that scale is still theoretical and hasn't shown its downsides yet.

Nuclear has shown all its downsides, and they have been 95% corrected. It's a mature, known technology.

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

#218

Post by eigenvector » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

wiggler00m wrote: post #207

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…

One of the biggest advantages renewable energy has over both nuclear and mega-dams is that the size of project required to achieve the commonly quoted LCOE (levelized cost of energy) is much, much smaller. 50 MW or perhaps less per site, versus 1000+ MW.

This means:

1. no mega projects that attract similarly sized public opposition

2. 1-2 year construction timelines instead of 10+

3. much, much less financial and regulatory risk

4. if an individual project goes off the rails because of bad management, it just gets cancelled instead of being pushed forward with endless public dollars because of sunk cost fallacies

The private sector is well able to stomach the risk level of wind and solar and finance and build it on their own, whereas nuclear and mega hydro essentially require government financial backing, which again contributes to the agency problem.

We know we can build 1,000s of MW of wind and solar per year in a safe and cost-effective way because we're already doing that. Every single nuclear or dam project in North America right now is a delayed, over-budget financial and project management boondoggle.

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

#219

Post by skookumchuck » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:17 AM UTC

scarygliders wrote: post #160

skookumchuck wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just put the generators on stilts, in a bunker, or simply hardened them against flooding. There were other design flaws, too, like venting hydrogen inside the building rather than outside.

Indeed. I'll point out, however, that the Error Cascade began with the loss of the underground backup generators - hydrogen would not have been a problem if the backup generators were operative.

Yes. The way to a robust system is to stop every link in the zipper effect, not just the initiating event.

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

#220

Post by BurningFrog » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:18 AM UTC

i_am_proteus wrote: post #196

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.

At the time, the media was conflating deaths from the earthquake (there were around 15,000) and "deaths from the reactor accident."

That's the most distasteful thing of all for me.

15,896 people died that day, and no one (outside Japan) gives a shit because there was some radiation leakage and property damage.