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

nytimes.com

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

#621

Post by Grue3 »

ilitirit wrote: post #187
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…

> My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account To be honest, you could probably make that argument for anything under question in any scenario. But even if we were to skip the logical loopholes ("We took it into account, but we decided the benefits outweighed the costs because of "), let's just look at the raw numbers or simply just historical facts. Have any disast…

Have nuclear plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries? I'm pretty sure Pripyat can be made habitable if someone wanted to live there, with enough financial investments. It's just that there's so much already habitable land in Belarus/Ukraine that nobody really bothered. Japan is actually trying to cleanup Hamadoori coast, which I believe they will in a few decades, and I think we'll get a lot of valuable decontamination tech and experience out of this.

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

#622

Post by vlehto »

lispm wrote: post #588
vlehto wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we talk about future, everything is random stuff pulled from someones ass. Future cannot be researched, calculated or predicted. You can just be worried about stuff and bet on some solutions to give your children a decent place to live in.

> Future cannot be researched, calculated or predicted Sure it can. Otherwise you wouldn't know about the effects of climate change. > You can just be worried about stuff and bet on some solutions to give your children a decent place to live in. Use a bicycle. Don't fly. Don't make vacation on a cruise ship. Don't buy flown in goods. Don't eat meat. Don't reproduce. Recycle stuff. Get solar onto your roof. Heat with…

>Otherwise you wouldn't know about the effects of climate change.

Well actually we don't know. We have maybe a sophisticated guess at best. Knowledge requires data, that by definition cannot be gathered from future. At least not before someone invents a time machine.

Even the best forecasts we can make about anything are very poor. Look at a simple things like construction budgets or projected congestion of particular traffic system upgrade. They are usually off by magnitude of order. And this is well documented by Kahnemann.

In regards of atmosphere, it might be that IPCC has overestimated the whole thing with a fat margin. Or it might be we are all dead no matter what we do.

>Don't reproduce.

If I don't do that, then I'm not going to give a shit about this phenomena anyhow.

>Heat with electricity from non-fossil fuels.

Where I'm from, that's impossible without the whole state going non-fossil fuel. Which again is practically impossible without nuclear.

Heating accounts probably about half of my carbon footprint. And with rough winters that's a lot. I've already minimized everything else.

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

#623

Post by v_lisivka »

kuzehanka wrote: post #438
Tomte wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They can make "dirty bomb". I know some people which had training about how to destroy hostile Western country by using their own radioactive materials.

For example, in 2014, rebels in Donetsk had attempt to create "dirty bomb" using radioactive waste from abandoned chemical plant. Fortunately, they were spotted and stopped.

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

#624

Post by MertsA »

Tomte wrote: post #381
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…

That may all very well be true, but it still means that the power plant was unsafe . All the time nuclear power fans tell us that "this time we've learned and current design are safe". And all the time bad things happen and they have to admit "well, not when X happens". Or "not when A and then B happens". Just as you did here. It's nice that Fukushima could have survived an earthquake, but the tsunami isn't a freak a…

>All the time nuclear power fans tell us that "this time we've learned and current design are safe".

This is a strawman argument. No one is claiming that old reactors are getting safer as we come up with better designs. None of the newer designs that people are claiming are safer have had issues. Fukushima was literally constructed before Chernobyl.

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

#625

Post by joss82 »

logifail wrote: post #620
joss82 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3MW is the peak power when the wind is blowing constantly at the maximum speed the wind turbine was designed to operate (and not over, at which point the turbine enters safe mode and stops to prevent damage). Load factors for wind turbines are rarely over 40%. Nuclear's is 80%. So you'd need 2200 turbines to replace one Hinkley point. And all the gas power plants to make the energy when the wind is not blowing...

> Nuclear's is 80% Why is that? I'm sure we're all broadly in favour of free markets. Do electricity consumers buy nuclear because it's good value?[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

Because the nuclear reaction is not dependant on the wind blowing to produce energy.

It's not 100% because you need to do maintenance at times.

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

#626

Post by redprince »

ElBarto wrote: post #615
lispm wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could also be much much less habitated with one Fukushima or Chernobyl scale event.

We know how to make nuclear power safe. Nuclear power is safe. It's not helpful to try to kill the discussion by stroking irrational fears.

> We know how to make nuclear power safe.

No, we really don't. We know how to make all sorts of things reasonably safe. Yet planes still fall out of the sky, refineries catch on fire, dams fail, etc. In essence: Any nuclear reactor will have a probability different from zero for producing an incredibly expensive nuclear accident.

Much about accidents in complex high risk technologies has been said in "Normal Accidents" by Perrow in the 80s. The reasons he identified why complex systems fail will always be with us. Especially the notion that it is more often than not the organizations and not the technology which enables major accidents.

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

#627

Post by AntiTechTechie »

joss82 wrote: post #625
logifail wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear's is 80% Why is that? I'm sure we're all broadly in favour of free markets. Do electricity consumers buy nuclear because it's good value?[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

Because the nuclear reaction is not dependant on the wind blowing to produce energy. It's not 100% because you need to do maintenance at times.

I would think that they'd run it closer to 100% and do all the maintenance during a scheduled outage...at least that's how I understand they do the maintenance planning/scheduling at Palo Verde.

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

#628

Post by pfdietz »

ftr45 wrote: post #590
pytester wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly doesn't look like natural gas usage is ramping up: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g... >They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming. That's because France started replacing fossil fuels with nuclear in the 80s. That was the only sensible approach to reducing CO2 in the 80s. This isn't the 80s though. >In an ideal world, renewable would re…

>I mean, it's half the cost of nuclear it's not https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...

Your report is from 2015. Given how rapidly PV costs have continued to decline (and how major nuclear efforts collapsed with cost explosions since then), that's useless.

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

#629

Post by pfdietz »

ftr45 wrote: post #589
pytester wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

nuclear is the safest and cheapest option https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect... https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...

Maybe you should try living in 2019, rather than 2012 or 2015.

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

#630

Post by reitanqild »

redprince wrote: post #626
ElBarto wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how to make nuclear power safe. Nuclear power is safe. It's not helpful to try to kill the discussion by stroking irrational fears.

> We know how to make nuclear power safe. No, we really don't. We know how to make all sorts of things reasonably safe. Yet planes still fall out of the sky, refineries catch on fire, dams fail, etc. In essence: Any nuclear reactor will have a probability different from zero for producing an incredibly expensive nuclear accident. Much about accidents in complex high risk technologies has been said in "Normal Accident…

> Any nuclear reactor will have a probability different from zero for producing an incredibly expensive nuclear accident.

A coal fired power plant will also have a probability different from zero for producing nuclear waste.

In fact, AFAIK the radiation risk from living near a coal powered power plant is significantly larger than living next to a nuclear reactor.

I guess if this was taken into account coal powered power plants would also require incredibly expensive cleanup.

That said as long as renewable is cheaper we should go with that going forward.

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