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

#241

Post by realusername » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:16 AM UTC

jhayward wrote: post #206

godelski wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because it's a next-gen project, that's what happens with R&D.

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

#242

Post by scarygliders » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:17 AM UTC

davrosthedalek wrote: post #159

scarygliders wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The positive thing about hindsight is that we the human race can learn from it and subsequently re-design things like nuclear power plants, amongst a whole swathe of other technology. Situated in an earthquake/tsunami-prone land? Situate backup generators on higher ground, build tidal walls sufficiently high. The human race is built upon hindsight. Who was the first human who unfortunately tried eating a poisonous pl…

I'm not dissing anybody, but I believe that there are more ways something can go wrong than we have tried yet. Luckily, our progress is not only dependent on hindsight.

My response was not directed at you personally, but was a response in general for the benefit of everyone reading the topic.

The point being that the human race's total knowledge and subsequent forward movement is based entirely on "that happened therefore ."

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

#243

Post by kristopolous » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:18 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #210

rladd wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Alright sure. Coal is also a terrible idea for energy and we also shouldn't be having coal.

Pro nuclear people have this bizarre dichotomy as if it's either Charles Dickens 1840 style coal or Star Trek style nuclear.

In reality, cost in storage and renewables are dropping like Moore's law (they have their own thing called Swanson's law) and even if you did everything right with nuclear you'd be losing money on it in the lifetime of the plant compared to things like wind.

Pennsylvania had a bill recently to keep some nuclear plants open... It would involve an increase in the cost of electricity because it's more expensive.

That's why investors have run away from it. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are increasingly cheaper and easier to deploy and scale and the future trajectories heavily favor them.

The only thing nuclear has is a centralization of power, capital, control, and ownership. You have one robber baron waving his scepter over the entire energy consuming public because nuclear is extraordinarily centralized. It keeps energy being run as feudal monarchies and that's a power the industry doesn't want to cede.

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

#244

Post by grecy » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:19 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…

It's also interesting to note the headline is "Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions.."

Even if the US was totally committed, and decided to build a brand new reactor right now, how long would it take? A decade?

We can slap up renewables in a fraction of that time, and spend the next decade reaping the rewards, not sitting around waiting for the magical payoff of a reactor that will cost billions to build and operate, and doesn't do us a lick of good for an entire decade!

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

#245

Post by realusername » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:20 AM UTC

hugi wrote: post #24

cm2187 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much because Merkel decided so in the days following Fukushima. Not exactly the result of long term strategy.

Fukushima was an excellent demonstration of what can happen. You devastate huge areas of land and make them unlivable for generations. This is especially applicable to the United States that has proven entirely unable to handle it's own nuclear waste and just accumulates it at the sites where it's generated, waiting for disaster to happen.

Is that sarcasm? The exclusion zone of Fukushima is very small and people already live there again. The total impact of Fukushima (the nuclear disaster) is one death of a plant employee and 3 people getting cancer.

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

#246

Post by realusername » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:22 AM UTC

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.

You have worse waste than nuclear waste, some chemical waste does not even degrade with time and will be there forever, doesn't that sound even scarier?

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

#247

Post by externalreality » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:23 AM UTC

So there are problems. Its also the fastest way to the destroy the world. If you dot the world with these things we become one climate disaster or earth quake away from having written a check that our collective asses can't cash.

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

#248

Post by euske » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:24 AM UTC

In 2011, a week after the Japan's earthquake, NYTimes wrote an article that was rather critical of nuclear energy. I wonder when the flip flop happened.

"Living With a Nuclear Question Mark in the Backyard" https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/nyregion/17towns.html

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

#249

Post by microcolonel » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:26 AM UTC

kenneth wrote: post #229

davrosthedalek wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that "taking all disaster scenarios into account" is easy in hindsight, but maybe not in planning. But I believe that modern nuclear power reactors can be build intrinsically safe. For me, the real problem begins with the treatment of the waste: It's hard to find a good place to store it or reprocess it. Not so much because finding the actual place is hard, but because using that place will face hard o…

I'm not so sure I'd pick Democracy over nuclear power. Recent years have made me question our idea of the absolute superiority of Democracy. Look at the clusterfuck that is the US "democracy" vs the success of Singapore or even China. The rest of the Western world in Europe is barely better off than the US. On the other hand, not getting nuclear power deployed ASAP everywhere essentially means the long term destructi…

> success of ... China

Not sure I'd take that definition of success. China seems like an absolute failure in the face of almost certain success. The CCP seems to ruin every good thing about the Chinese culture, suppress every positive instinct, and punish every decent behaviour. They absolutely do not care about your silly environmental causes, and if you got in the way of any one of their state-sponsored ecological disasters, you would be crushed like roadkill.

I think nuclear power generation is an excellent idea, but if it is somehow incompatible with representative democracy, there just isn't an option, I guess we have to find some other good way to generate power. Though I think the idea that the two are incompatible is nonsense.

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

#250

Post by scarygliders » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:29 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #221

scarygliders wrote: post #128

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 s…

So what is your take on what seems to be the complete and utter failure for the cleanup and dealing with the aftermath?

It is extremely difficult to clean up thousands of kilometers of contaminated land - esecially if said land is comprised of mountainous area...

Miyakoji-machi itself is situated in a valley surrounded by hundreds of square kilometers of mountainous terrain. To blithley claim it would somehow be easy to decontaminate thousansd of square kilometers of mountainous area is naive folly.

It is an extremely diffcult problem to solve.