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

#501

Post by imtringued » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:29 AM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #444

michaelmrose wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to burn more coal except people who own stocks in coal. In other news being beat with a stick sounds like a better alternative to being blown up but most of use would prefer a massage.

The Germans seems to prefer coal to nuclear. Oh, maybe they thought lowering nuclear would increase the renewable? The renewable sure did increase, but it doesn't compensate the decrease in nuke power. What did is the other fossil fuels. Of course, most Germans would deny that. But the fact is, reducing nuke power leave us only two alternatives: increase the consumption of coal/oil etc, or decrease energy consumption…

Renewables today produce twice as much power as nuclear plants back when Germany had twice as much nuclear than it has now and the share is growing by 4-5% per year. By the time a new nuclear plant is done Germany would be at 90% renewables.

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

#502

Post by madez » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:35 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #174

madez wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why nuclear rectors were ever built without the ability to shutdown passively in case of power and equipment failure.

Normal reactors do shut down when the power fails. the control rods lose power and fall in. The hard part is cooling the reactor afterwards due to nuclear decay heat. Normal reactors use double-redundant super-reliable diesel generators to do this. This works fine until you out your diesel in the basement in a tsumani zone. Ebr-2 can shut down without CR insertion (crazy robust, CRs always go in) and then can cool it…

> Normal reactors use double-redundant super-reliable diesel generators to do this.

Relying on diesel generators is not a passive solution. That is basically the part where I wonder why not a passive solution was picked.

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

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Post by pfdietz » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:35 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…

| Because you can't run steel mills and other big energy consumers with solar or wind.

Ah, the Argument from Bad Engineering. If you stop and think real hard I'm sure you could imagine many ways to do this. And they'd be cheaper than trying to run steel mills off nuclear reactors.

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

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Post by pfdietz » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:37 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #481

the_why_of_y wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There really aren't any of these in the scale we need, they're used even today to offset peak loads. And all of them still burn fossil fuels. The US has a fancy water pumping station in the scale we'd need (3000MW)[0], but it relies heavily on the local geography and wouldn't be economically feasible in the Netherlands for example. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

The reason peaking turbines use fossil fuels is the lack of a carbon tax sufficient to drive them to other inputs. In particular, they'd migrate to renewable hydrogen in a CO2-constrained situation.

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

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Post by kuzehanka » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:37 AM UTC

aurelwu wrote: post #499

kuzehanka wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's always about cost As the direness of the climate situation becomes more and more urgent, cost becomes irrelevant. During times of emergency and total war, dollars don't mean anything. If you have the manpower and the raw resources to do something, it gets done. Ignoring the politics and economics of energy production, from a physics standpoint nuclear is a high outlier in terms of energy density per resource s…

the energy density would be a factor if we had any actual space issues. But the area needed for solar and wind is not what is the problem. I agree with you that it is an emergency where not enough action is taken, but even then why not go for 100% Renewables (with Battery, Power-To-Gas, Power-To-Liquid etc. as storage) when that is cheaper than nuclear.

Three reasons.

1: It's not actually cheaper than nuclear. The majority of the cost associated with nuclear is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China). Discounting this cost makes nuclear the dominant option. Factoring for lifecycle costs pushes it much further ahead. Fun fact: there is currently no way to recycle photovoltaics whose useful lifespan is 20 years.

2: Use of landmass. Deploying wind or solar consumes landmass which must be cleared of flora/fauna. The landmass required to power a nation via these means is not at all negligible. This is contrary to managing climate change for obvious reasons.

Geothermal power stands as an exception here and should absolutely be deployed over nuclear where permissible.

3: Excess capacity. The climate debate is converging on the fact that we are past the point of no return and we need to actively sequester carbon out of the atmosphere to get back to a healthy scenario. Ignoring the specifics, this basically means that we need to 'un-spend' all the energy that we have consumed over the last 50 years via fossil fuels. While still meeting the growing energy demands of civilisaion. We need to be producing a huge excess of energy for this strategy to be viable.

Renewables are nice, but pragmatically they are not nearly enough to dig us out of the hole where we have found ourselves.

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

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Post by jki275 » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:37 AM UTC

v_lisivka wrote: post #449

theshrike79 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bet, we will develop that technology in much much shorter time than we need to store nuclear waste.

There’s little need to store nuclear waste. Reprocess it and use the remaining fuel.

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

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Post by Gondolin » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:41 AM UTC

pytester wrote: post #473

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…

Yep, Hinkley point is ~£95 per MWh while renewables are ~£45. It makes no sense to complain about how polluting coal plants are in relation to nuclear. It isn't the main source of competition. Germany has been taking both nuclear and coal offline and renewables have been plugging the gap for both for some years now and will likely continue to do so. It boggles my mind that the nuclear industry itself demands that all…

Germany has been taking coal offline after taking nuclear offline; and are replacing coal by gas (so they depend even more on Russia) instead of replacing it by nuclear or renewable.

They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming.

In an ideal world, renewable would replace everything. We are not yet in this ideal world, and we don't know the time frame to get to it (there are huge technological challenges, while the challenge for nuclear reactor are solved since 50 years. Of course they are still RD to be done on the nuclear side too, like molten salt reactors).

Given the economic and human cost of global warming, investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet. Again, I am not saying that nuclear is a miracle energy that will solve all our problem (fusion would be). Nuclear energy does have a lot of problems. But these problems are trivial which respect to global warming, and we should solve global warming first (which again will involve even more electricity than we produce right now).

Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!) is like worrying about a leak under the sink while the whole house is on fire.

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

#508

Post by ElBarto » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:43 AM UTC

pytester wrote: post #473

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…

Yep, Hinkley point is ~£95 per MWh while renewables are ~£45. It makes no sense to complain about how polluting coal plants are in relation to nuclear. It isn't the main source of competition. Germany has been taking both nuclear and coal offline and renewables have been plugging the gap for both for some years now and will likely continue to do so. It boggles my mind that the nuclear industry itself demands that all…

Calculate how many wind generators you need to guarantee the same production as Hinkley point and you'll see that it is not really realistic.

Then, take into account the goal of making of vehicles electric in the next 20 years.

There is no viable alternative to nuclear as of today even if renewables should of course be pushed as much as possible.

Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons. (wood fired plants are counted as renewables in the EU, by the way)

The absolute priority should be to get rid of emissions, i.e. fossil fuels. Germany decided to get rid of nuclear energy first.

They are not a good example to follow.

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

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Post by pfdietz » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:45 AM UTC

petre wrote: post #310

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…

A considerable part of the waste can be reprocessed and further burned in fast breeder reactors, creating fuel for the conventional ones. The rest can be vitrified and stored. Why we don't already do this? Fear of nuclear proliferation, breeders are quite expensive, anti nuclear sentiment.

We don't reprocess spent fuel because it's a net economic loss to do so. The separated plutonium is sufficiently difficult to turn into fuel that, far from saving money, it costs more than just enriching fresh uranium.

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

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Post by Amygaz » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 11:50 AM UTC

Xylakant wrote: post #490

stingraycharles wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hate the banana equivalent dose. It entirely papers over the substantial difference between alpha, beta and gamma radiation, ignores where radioactive substances accumulate in the body and what effect those differences on the actual inflicted damage have. It’s a cheap stunt to dismiss any sort of reasonable debate. If you cite it in defence of any actual nuclear fallout pollution, I personally consider it as proof…

Not only that but, you would have be constantly exposed by constantly eating bananas. And even at one banana/minute you would only be exposed to an amount of radiation that is lower than living on earth.

If BED was a thing, banana plantation workers would all radiation poisoning.