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

#451

Post by loup-vaillant » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:00 AM UTC

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.

> Your conclusion is different than mine, therefore you are talking nonesense. Consider coming back when you get closer to my level of knowledge.

Be careful about how you know what you think you know. How informed are you about these matters? Have you taken a good look at the numbers? I know I haven't. How trustworthy are your sources? Why do you trust your sources? Are they expert or something, or do they happen to appeal to you emotionally?

This is a problem at the global scale we're talking about. We need good solid numbers. The number of articles in the newspaper for instance is not a good solid number. Emotion is not a good number.

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

#452

Post by Gondolin » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:01 AM UTC

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…

Renewable are a way better source of energy than nuclear power and we should definitively invest on them. But currently they does not suffice (because we don't have enough energy storage capacity). So we need nuclear both - now, to complete renewable, instead of using gas/coal - in the future, as a back up plan, if good storage technology is not found and renewable are not enough.

Remember that we will need a lot more electric energy if we want electric cars and use energy for decarbonisation; so we should use nuclear until renewable completely fill the gap.

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

#453

Post by rocqua » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:02 AM UTC

antt wrote: post #360

BluSyn wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both technologies are proven. One has proven to be cheaper than the other.

I'm from Australia, the only thing that a grid without nuclear or coal has proven is that it can't deal with sustained demand. This year we came perilously close to having to choose which hospitals to cut power to when the there were two 40C days in a row. If we have a week of that weather Mad Max will be a become a documentary.

Was it actually renewables slumping in production or demand surging? If the second, how different would the situation have been with traditional power?

I ask because a 40C day sounds like a problem due to AC usage, but would probably come with pretty effective solar, and decent wind near the sea.

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

#454

Post by DennisP » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:02 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #434

Gondolin wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you should read the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree.

Billions of deaths at three degrees is probably overstating things, but three degrees does bring massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of refugees. At four degrees, billions of deaths doesn't look that unlikely, and it starts getting hard to imagine how modern civilization could survive. More than that is unthinkable.

The book is a decade old but more recent work hasn't improved the outlook at all.

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

#455

Post by lispm » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:03 AM UTC

vlehto wrote: post #448

lispm wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

http://withouthotair.com/ "A vital tool agains global warming" means that it's our only possibility. It's not about cost, it's about what is physically possible.

repeated appeals were not what I was looking for. where are the numbers which describe the the contribution of nuclear power to control global warming? How many? What timeframe? Costs? Who builds them? Which models? Where do we build them? What effects does it have when? What are possible scenarios?

If nuclear proponents want to be taken serious, they need to answer those kinds of questions. Currently nuclear is stagnating on a global scale.

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

#456

Post by the_why_of_y » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:04 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #433

progfix wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

What is needed as a complement to renewable energy is dispatchable generation, i.e., plants that can be quickly turned on and off as the supply from renewables changes. Nuclear (and also coal) is a really bad option for this because the time to turn these plants on an off is measured in days.

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

#457

Post by lispm » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:04 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #437

lispm wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Check the fate of the EPR projects.

Just replacing eol reactors in the west will be hard.

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

#458

Post by jabl » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:04 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #105

catdog wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the beginning of this statement is not really true: > Germany, which went all-in for renewables… This might have been the case more than a decade ago with the green party being part of the government but the political climate changed. Angela Merkel talks a lot about saving the climate but actual policy is the opposite slowing down the switch to renewable energy as much as possible. > From what I read and hear Nu…

> Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster [citation needed]. It was in the 1950s, for sure, before we knew that you should ventilate the radon. Today a lot of it is done in ways that's much cleaner than mining for resources for coal, fracking, or heavy metals for millions upon millions of battery banks, wind turbines, and solar panels. Remember E=MC 2 is the key excitement about nuclear energy. T…

> with breeder reactors and reprocessing (super expensive, but that's another story)

Till and Chang argue in their book about the IFR that if we start building IFR style plants for production usage it's entirely possible that costs drop to about LWR levels.

So far fast breeders have been expensive, but that's largely because they've all been one-off designs largely for R&D purposes without much effort to reduce costs.

For reprocessing, their argument is that electrorefining (pyroprocessing) would be much cheaper than PUREX. To the point that the lower fuel acquisition cost and cheaper waste disposal could make it roughly comparable to once-through LWR costs, even with relatively cheap uranium.

Such a shame IFR was shut down.. sigh

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

#459

Post by stingraycharles » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:05 AM UTC

tramav wrote: post #447

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…

>It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. Today Germany is still affected by the radioactive fallout (Chernobyl). For example many wild boars in Thuringia are radioactively contaminated with caesium-137. It will still take about 300 years until the radioactive caesium-137 vanishes.

A banana is radioactive as well. What is the exact negative effect compared to coal?

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

#460

Post by merb » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:06 AM UTC

scarygliders wrote: post #154

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 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…

> 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.

most reactors fail because of humans and money, how can you learn about that? just look at fukushima, some problems were known, but the management have found that such a event cant happen and saved some money here and there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...