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

#631

Post by pfdietz » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

yk wrote: post #528

Well, the nuclear renaissance since 2010 is marked by a decline in the number of reactors [0] and we just do not the capacity to build more, because the production of pressure vessels is severely limited. Plus most nuclear reactors are around 30 years old [1], so many will be decommissioned over the next 20 years. Therefore it is simply not possible to build up the share of nuclear in the power generation mix, except…

It will not have to compete with fusion in the late 2030s. It will likely never have to compete with fusion. Fusion is just ridiculously bad from a practical point of view.

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

#632

Post by logifail » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

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.

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

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, I was alluding to the lively debate about how the selling price for electricity is set, and how it should vary depending on market conditions.

I see no reason to lock-in minimum pricing for any kind of electricity generation many decades in advance. Why is that necessary for new nuclear plants?

In other words: do we need to guarantee a minimum market price 30 years in advance in order to make it look like building a nuclear plant makes economic sense?

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

#633

Post by ElBarto » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

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…

We have "probability different from zero" to be annihilated by an asteroid...

This is again spreading irrational fears.

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

#634

Post by pfdietz » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 7:03 PM UTC

jokoon wrote: post #563

Brakenshire wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is cheap if governments back the loans (all the cost is up front so a 2% or 5% interest rate has a massive impact on final project cost), and if the projects can be delivered consistently on budget (conspicuously not the case for any of the most recent designs with passive safety features).

Not cheap, but probably still cheaper than renewables, per kWh. Also the problem with renewables is the power output curve, which are unpredictable because of sunlight and wind fluctuations, which will be compensated with coal/gas energy. Less of a problem with nuclear.

Nuclear is much more expensive per kWh than renewables.

The intermittency of renewables renders nuclear unable to coexist with them. Nuclear is inflexible and wants to be able to sell all the time, but can't do that when renewables crash the price on the power market. You might say this is a renewable problem, but it's just as much a problem of nuclear being too inflexible to adapt to a dynamic power market.

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

#635

Post by capsulecorp » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

jason0597 wrote: post #553

capsulecorp wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But having grew up there I obviously read up about it a lot I disagree, what you read isn't obvious and still doesn't qualify you to speak on the matter unless it was legitimate and vetted information. Reading a bunch of infowars doesn't make me a legitimate political commentator.

How do you know what they read?

Exactly my point, I don't know, and it isn't "obvious" as he claims. For all I know its the equivalent of infowars, skepticism is my default position, like it or not.

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

#636

Post by godelski » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

_ph_ wrote: post #520

godelski wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to save everyone some time here. acidburnNSA is a reactor scientist (he pops up in most of these nuclear threads). He's leading you on because your information is bad. Fact is that food didn't get to dangerous levels. (I'd trust the domain expert) Pulling from __ph__'s link (and a google translate). > The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms containing 3,000 becquerels of cesium-137 per kilogram results in…

The website I linked is the federal agency for nuclear safety. Depends entirely what you mean by "dangerous levels". It is contaminated enough, that mushrooms from the forests are not allowed to be sold as food. Yes, a single serving won't have a significant impact on your health, but it is recommended not to eat much of them. The situation is worse with some wild boar, which eat a lot of those mushrooms and accumula…

Dangerous levels has an exact definition. The EU sets them at 20mSv/yr. To put that in perspective, 1Sv is equivalent to a 5% increase in chance of getting cancer during your lifetime (granted, that dose needs to be spread out). So you can see that they keep it REALLY low. Extra safety is used because they use the linear no-threshold model. Yes, the model is linear so you can extrapolate easily.

Those levels that acidburn was talking about, mentioned in the article, are REALLY low. The reason government is overly cautious with radiation is 1) fear 2) you can't control sources so you say "if we set this threshold we'll never put anyone in danger even if they take in large amounts from other sources that we can't control."

Remember, each of those 200g of mushrooms (which looks like an upper limit of measurement, not average nor lower) is like a 5hr plane ride in a non-northern route (8uSv). People take plane rides worse than that several times a week and are safe. (see below for ridiculousness of this "danger")

You also realize that over time these things degrade, right? Not just by radioactive decay, but because organisms and chemical reactions break down the radioactive materials. You seem to be implying that over the many years it is getting worse. Which is just untrue (and frankly should not pass a smell test).

Side note:

200g mushrooms = 0.008mSv (upper limit)

20mSv/(0.008mSv)*200g = 500kg of mushrooms.

That's how many you would need to eat in a year to get to the legal limit. Let's be real here, this is just a ridiculous amount of mushrooms that you have to consume within a year. That's over a kilo a day.

Note that this limit used to also be 50mSv for radiation workers. Astronauts are allowed much more.

tldr: Trust the domain expert over some article you read on the internet.

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

#637

Post by lispm » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

vlehto wrote: post #622

lispm wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 particula…

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

I fear that any savings in CO2 emissions will be useless, due to an increasing world population.

> Heating accounts probably about half of my carbon footprint

Heating, travel, transportation, industrial production, production of chemicals, production of concrete/cement ( https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844 ), food production, ... all those need to be addressed across the whole spectrum of climate-active gas - not just Co2, but also Methan and others.

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

#638

Post by Gondolin » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 8:19 PM UTC

lispm wrote: post #613

Gondolin wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it wanted to get rid of nuclear first and as fast as possible. And this killed a few thousand persons and rejected MegaTons of CO2 in the atmosphere that could have been avoided. > The next two decades will bring the end of coal-based electricity. This is 30 years later than could have been, and gas instead of coal is not the solution either. Will Germany have 100% renewable in 20 years? > When do you stop…

> Again, the drawbacks of nuclear power are nothing compared to the drawback of climate change One Fukushima or Chernobyl scale event in a densely populated country like Germany on a densely populated continent like Europe? Having reactors with molten cores near my home town with a 5 mill people metro area? Japan had massive luck that the wind wasn't blowing in the direction of Tokyo.

Chernobyl: cannot happen.

Fukushima: how many deaths? Even if the wind was blowing in the direction of Tokyo?

But sure, let's close the nuclear reactor who killed nobody in Germany, and keep open the coal plants which still accounted for 228TWh in 2018, meaning they killed around 22800 persons per year. And let's only close them in 2038, 30 years later, having wasted 350 Million Tons of CO2 by year and killed hundreds of thousands of people in total.

We are lucky that the gas lobby is way less evil than the nuclear lobby " rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1110278976654794753>

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

#639

Post by blablabla123 » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 8:44 PM UTC

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…

> - coal produce radioactive waste too

That's quite a statement. Do you have references?

I mean the nuclear waste from nuclear power plants is ridiculously difficult to handle because of its high temperature. It has to be wrapped in layers of containers - after cooling off for months (years?) in a water bath.

> 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. (At the beginning they even had to open more coal plants!) This means that Fukushima (which made Germany close its nuclear plants) killed a lot more people in Germany than in Japan.

Fukushima lead to closing of Nuclear power plants, obviously, and not coal plants. The share of renewables in Germany increased a lot. To my knowledge the only coal power plants that were set up in the recent years were really modern ones. Therefore I cannot follow the argument, could you elaborate?

> Recall that coal is 1000 times more deadly than nuclear per unit of energy (including the nuclear accidents).

Recall also that there is no insurance that covers nuclear power plants but driving a car without insurance is not allowed in most countries.

The difference between coal and nuclear energy is that the latter is very close to the limits of what we can control.

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

#640

Post by DanBC » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 8:47 PM UTC

blablabla123 wrote: post #639

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…

> - coal produce radioactive waste too That's quite a statement. Do you have references? I mean the nuclear waste from nuclear power plants is ridiculously difficult to handle because of its high temperature. It has to be wrapped in layers of containers - after cooling off for months (years?) in a water bath. > It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nucle…

> That's quite a statement. Do you have references?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html

> Coal is largely composed of organic matter, but it is the inorganic matter in coal—minerals and trace elements— that have been cited as possible causes of health, environmental, and technological problems associated with the use of coal. Some trace elements in coal are naturally radioactive. These radioactive elements include uranium (U), thorium (Th), and their numerous decay products, including radium (Ra) and radon (Rn). Although these elements are less chemically toxic than other coal constituents such as arsenic, selenium, or mercury, questions have been raised concerning possible risk from radiation. In order to accurately address these questions and to predict the mobility of radioactive elements during the coal fuel-cycle, it is important to determine the concentration, distribution, and form of radioactive elements in coal and fly ash.