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

431–440 of 731 posts

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

#431

Post by lazyjones »

kuzehanka wrote: post #422
lazyjones wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose. How can you write such a ridiculous sentence? We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. It's a permanent subject of dispute here in Europe. > If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after…

> We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. Cite please. The tens of millions affected by a feasible powerplant issue. Explosion is not really in the realm of feasible unless we're talking about bombs or uncontained soviet reactors.

I'm sure you will be able to look up the location of active nuclear power plants in central Europe and determine the population figures within the range of impact of an accident like Chernobyl's if you try. Start with Mohovce (largely uncontained and litigation since 2005 or so), Bohunice, Temelin and the large cities nearby...

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

#432

Post by Tomte »

BurningFrog wrote: post #183
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…

The obvious solution is to store it in an unpopulated location. Only 15% of the Earth's surface is populated. Yes, observant reader, parts of the ocean floor are some of the best candidate areas.

> Only 15% of the Earth's surface is populated

By humans.

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

#433

Post by theshrike79 »

progfix wrote: post #420
Gondolin wrote: post #400

I am flabbergasted that some commenters here argue against nuclear because of waste and accidents, while ignoring that - coal produce radioactive waste too - it kills a lot more persons (without taking into account global warning) due to air pollution - the economic cost of nuclear may be underestimated, but this is nothing compared to the economic cost of global warming. Renewable (wind and solar) are extremely impo…

And I am flabbergasted (again) because of the pro nuclear power comments. Why should we create energy from something so complicated and hard to control when we have something simple and easy to grasp like water, solar and windpower? I understand statistically speaking a nuclear power plant is save, but the risk is calculated by multiplying propability of occurance and potential loss. The potential loss in a maximum c…

Because you can't run steel mills and other big energy consumers with solar or wind. These require power in the scale of Terawatts each year. 24/7.

Renewables like solar and wind are decent for offsetting peaks and maybe generate some household electricity, but you're delusional if you think they can be used to replace coal or nuclear in the next decade. Or even quarter century.

Until we make giant leaps in energy storage technology, we NEED something that can provide a steady base flow of electricity 24/7/365.

And currently nuclear power is our best option for that. Burning fossil fuels (coal, wood, etc) is shit, we have only a limited number of places for water power.

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

#434

Post by lazyjones »

Gondolin wrote: post #430
lazyjones wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am very concerned for the future of my children that even well educated people (I have these same arguments with my university colleagues) don't realise that. Perhaps it's not very convincing to claim that "a few potential large nuclear explosions due to accident/malice" aren't as bad as an average temperature increase of 1 degree or so. Certainly seems borderline insane to me.

Again, coal related death are of the order of 1-5 millions by year. By contrast the worst estimate for Chernobyl is 200000 deaths. The closing of germany's reactor, which amount to around 60GWh, if it had been used instead to close coal based plants would have saved around 6000 lives per year. So over 10 years would have saved 60000 lives. An average temperature increase of 1 degree would not be so bad, it would prob…

> we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done.

It's beyond borderline insane how people make up these "billions of deaths" numbers with a straight face.

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

#435

Post by theshrike79 »

jtolmar wrote: post #429
Gondolin wrote: post #400

I am flabbergasted that some commenters here argue against nuclear because of waste and accidents, while ignoring that - coal produce radioactive waste too - it kills a lot more persons (without taking into account global warning) due to air pollution - the economic cost of nuclear may be underestimated, but this is nothing compared to the economic cost of global warming. Renewable (wind and solar) are extremely impo…

Has anyone discredited the old deaths per kilowatt hour metric? [1] If not, nuclear is still the safest source of power, even including disasters like Chernoble and Fukushima. The major disasters come to mind more readily because they receive heavy media coverage, but this is in part because they're so rare, unlike the utterly routine problem of coal ash ponds spilling. Outside of major disasters, nuclear power produ…

Yep. Coal plant deaths are local news.

A nuclear power plant failure (however minor) is global news for weeks and weeks.

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

#436

Post by roenxi »

michaelmrose wrote: post #408
roenxi wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We burn a tiny amount of fuel to get a lot of nuclear energy, and we burn a huge amount of coal to get a lot of thermal energy. You need to consume orders of magnitude more coal than atomic fuel to get the same amount of energy; so the trace elements in coal become a big deal. The radiation from coal isn't even the worst contaminant, you get all sorts of trace elements. Sulphur (causes acid rain around the power plan…

Pretending nuclear waste isn't an actual problem basically means your entire analysis is disastrously wrong. Consider contributing after doing further analysis.

It means my analysis is informed by a working knowledge of how we treat existing risk factors that affect human society. Everything I've seen suggests that in practice the macro-scale threat posed by radioactive material is similar to that posed by lead, but easier to deal with because the volumes are so tiny we can afford to isolate it completely from the biosphere.

We produce tiny amounts of waste, I can't find a great source but the numbers seem to be of the order of 10,000 to 100,000 m^3 of material that needs special handling and a much larger quantity that can be scientifically measured to have come from a nuclear plant if you have the right equipment. Those are tiny numbers compared to what industrial processes working with waste have to deal with (for scale, 1 small mine open pit coal mine would move that much material a week).

People are trying to protect the world from smaller risks than the environment already faces. It isn't rational, and it isn't very clever either. The volume of the problem is truly tiny compared to stuff we just walk on by as a society.

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

#437

Post by theshrike79 »

lispm wrote: post #413
Gondolin wrote: post #400

I am flabbergasted that some commenters here argue against nuclear because of waste and accidents, while ignoring that - coal produce radioactive waste too - it kills a lot more persons (without taking into account global warning) due to air pollution - the economic cost of nuclear may be underestimated, but this is nothing compared to the economic cost of global warming. Renewable (wind and solar) are extremely impo…

I find it puzzling that proponents of nuclear technology make various claims without any calculations to back that up. 'a vital tool agains global warming'? What does that mean in numbers? How many nuclear power plants of what types for what amount of effort would be built in what timeframe for to make any sizeable contribution? How would it work? A single reactor in the west is >10bn $ and takes a decade or more to…

Building new nuclear is slow and expensive because we stopped doing it for a looong time.

Way too many power plants are from the 80's and before. Maybe they've had a few upgrades, but they're mostly at the end of their lifespan or even over their recommended life.

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

#438

Post by kuzehanka »

Tomte wrote: post #427
kuzehanka wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. Cite please. The tens of millions affected by a feasible powerplant issue. Explosion is not really in the realm of feasible unless we're talking about bombs or uncontained soviet reactors.

Why would we leave out terrorist attacks? Because they destroy your argument?

What would a terrorist do with a nuclear powerplant exactly? We've flown fighter jets into nuclear powerplants to test them[1]. They're protected by armed guards. The US has a nuclear emergency task force ready to fly pumps and generators to any plant. The best attack even a highly resourced terrorist could mount would be to damage the cooling tower and not really make any difference?

If you're imagining some kind of super coordinated military unit taking control of a powerplant yeah sure maybe? They'd be much better used just poisoning the water supply.

This is exactly the kind of baseless fear driven hypothetical sentiment that I'd like to understand.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3072967/ns/business-check_point/t/...

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

#439

Post by theshrike79 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #403
andness wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that I don't think we can make nuclear safe. But if the choice seems to be between millions of deaths from global warming or thousands of deaths from nuclear, isn't the latter vastly preferable? Shouldn't we set out and build out nuclear to steer us away from the edge, and then worry about better solutions once we're safe? I suspect the reason people don't buy this argument is that they don't truly b…

Can you provide a timeline and justification on "millions of deaths from global warming". Why can't be invest the money in better alternatives and save the same "millions of lives" with actually sustainable tech that doesn't produce what you are describing as "thousands of deaths"

How much money and time would it take to research battery technology that could put coal and nuclear plants out of business?

We know how to build nuclear NOW. Let's do it. We can turn all the plants of the second someone finds out to store terawatts of power produced by renewable means in a cost-effective manner that doesn't rely on some geological anomalies.

Post reply on HN