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Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

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Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#91

Post by AstralStorm »

v_lisivka wrote: post #76
acidburnNSA wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if my family and job were there. Its a thriving wildlife refuge now. Check it out. https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/worlds-worst-energy-ac...

I can drive to Chornobyl by bicycle. I just don't want that. Wildlife is thriving in my area too, because people abandon homes and move to cities instead. However, if you like it, you can create similar exclusion zone near to you. Just vote for nuclear power and wait until next nuclear disaster.

Come on. You can drive nearly to the reactor itself and not even get a yearly background radiation dose now. There are a few hot spots where contaminated gear from decommissioning is stored, that's it.

People got cancers at increased rate, which is limited to less than two generations of damage. The range had expired a bunch of years ago.

Going into high mountains is a bigger radiation risk today.

As a bonus, you can just drive to Fukushima on a bike today and not even get a daily dose of some inhabited places in the US.

Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#92

Post by acidburnNSA »

v_lisivka wrote: post #74
jcranmer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl's exclusion zone was ~1000 mi^2, consisting of ~120,000 people. The Oroville dam evacuation zone is ~250mi^2 encompassing ~180,000 people. Floods are no laughing matters; the Chinese decision to break the levees of the Yellow River during the Second Sino-Japanese War is credited with killing 400,000 people or so and rendering millions homeless, and the land was unusable for the better part of a decade, not…

Chornobyl's exclusion zone covered small part of contaminated area only. My parent's home is in contaminated area, but nobody was evacuated. Cancer rate is 2.5x larger at average in four regions of Ukraine, which are near to Chornobyl. I saw 6m (20 foot) wide circle of dead grass at about 800m from my parents home, where a hot particle landed. Both my neighbors are died because of cancer. I live in clear region, but…

> Cancer rate is 2.5x larger at average in four regions of Ukraine, which are near to Chornobyl.

Citation needed. WHO says up to 4000 early cancer deaths total from Chernobyl. 2.5x larger cancer fatalities would be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people which is not seen by any credible study that I'm aware of.

My ex grew up in Gomel and didn't get cancer. Neither did her parents.

Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#93

Post by AstralStorm »

beat wrote: post #83
sharcerer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask why you aren't a fan?

Another reason, as I have a moment to write... vulnerability to terrorist/military action. It's not enough to safeguard a plant against accidents. It needs to be safeguarded from malice as well - including inside jobs (a knowledgeable operator manipulating the controls, with full authorization) and brute violence, which could be crashing a fully fueled airliner into it or attacking with a bunker-busting military dron…

If someone blows up a reactor of this design, it will start shutting down. Meltdown shouldn't happen even if the core is badly hit, but additional cooling besides the pool may be needed. Safer than Fukushima which withstood a tsunami and operational failure with little environmental damage. (Though big economical.)

The more important risk is of theft of fissible material.

Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#94

Post by smileysteve »

v_lisivka wrote: post #76
acidburnNSA wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if my family and job were there. Its a thriving wildlife refuge now. Check it out. https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/worlds-worst-energy-ac...

I can drive to Chornobyl by bicycle. I just don't want that. Wildlife is thriving in my area too, because people abandon homes and move to cities instead. However, if you like it, you can create similar exclusion zone near to you. Just vote for nuclear power and wait until next nuclear disaster.

> However, if you like it, you can create similar exclusion zone near to you. Just vote for nuclear power and wait until next nuclear disaster.

Reminder that coal has more radioactive waste over a decade than a nuclear plant does in its worst failure mode; and that worst failure mode is very unlikely with modern reactor designs (unlike Chernobyl and Fukushima)

Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#95

Post by Lutzb »

mcguire wrote: post #80
goatgate wrote: post #69

Complexity is the enemy of any reliable system. No energy source is simpler than solar arrays. They don't require any moving parts, thermal management, waste containment, or strong security. The only maintenance required is dusting. Why otherwise intelligent people cannot appreciate the cost of complexity for nuclear energy is beyond me, especially when viewed in contrast to something as simple as solar.

Except that solar doesn't provide power at night, and reduced power on some days. That means you need either storage or alternative power. Areas which can provide large amounts of solar tend to be located far from population centers. That means long range transmission systems, which are among the most complex systems in existence.

Or you could just overprovision solar.

Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#96

Post by smileysteve »

beat wrote: post #78
sharcerer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask why you aren't a fan?

A number of reasons, but for starters, consider inequality. Are we going to give Yemen a nuclear power plant? Somalia? Can Bolivia afford one? They are expensive, require tremendous infrastructure, and mean deploying fissionable materials to countries that maybe shouldn't have them. So it's solving a First World problem, and exacerbating the divide between rich and poor.

> Are we going to give Yemen a nuclear power plant? Somalia? Can Bolivia afford one?

This is an excellent case for these lighter reactors, but perhaps more so for molten salt / Thorium reactors.

Where this reactor has smaller amounts of radioactive material and Thorium has little use in weapons.

Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#97

Post by smileysteve »

beoh wrote: post #41
thrower123 wrote: post #28

Per gigawatt-hour, nuclear power as it stands may very well be the safest power source that we have got already. The biggest hurdle is irrational fear and the regulatory barriers consequent.

I wouldn't necessarily call it irrational. While there are far less incidents in nuclear power, their severity and long term harm are much greater while being very hard to get back under control as we have seen in the past. I would assume many would prefer to have broken a bone a few times in their life instead of a single shot in the head. This fear is very much understandable in my opinion. I do not mean to imply t…

> their severity and long term harm are much greater

This is false; Coal has more radioactive waste release to air, soil, and water. In the U.S. we store what we do capture in "ash pools".

Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#98

Post by beat »

smileysteve wrote: post #96
beat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A number of reasons, but for starters, consider inequality. Are we going to give Yemen a nuclear power plant? Somalia? Can Bolivia afford one? They are expensive, require tremendous infrastructure, and mean deploying fissionable materials to countries that maybe shouldn't have them. So it's solving a First World problem, and exacerbating the divide between rich and poor.

> Are we going to give Yemen a nuclear power plant? Somalia? Can Bolivia afford one? This is an excellent case for these lighter reactors, but perhaps more so for molten salt / Thorium reactors. Where this reactor has smaller amounts of radioactive material and Thorium has little use in weapons.

I have a market argument against thorium reactors - basically, if they were as awesome as their proponents argue, then someone would have built one by now, for commercial purposes. But there hasn't ever been a commercial thorium reactor, and there hasn't been a serious build since the 1960s. Fifty years, and a lot of countries that aren't full of namby-pamby treehuggers to blame for it. Even India, which is sitting on like a third of the world's thorium reserves, doesn't build them.

This makes me rather suspect that thorium isn't nearly as awesome as its proponents think it is.

Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#99

Post by beat »

AstralStorm wrote: post #93
beat wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason, as I have a moment to write... vulnerability to terrorist/military action. It's not enough to safeguard a plant against accidents. It needs to be safeguarded from malice as well - including inside jobs (a knowledgeable operator manipulating the controls, with full authorization) and brute violence, which could be crashing a fully fueled airliner into it or attacking with a bunker-busting military dron…

If someone blows up a reactor of this design, it will start shutting down. Meltdown shouldn't happen even if the core is badly hit, but additional cooling besides the pool may be needed. Safer than Fukushima which withstood a tsunami and operational failure with little environmental damage. (Though big economical.) The more important risk is of theft of fissible material.

I think I mentioned in my OP that I appreciate the eye to modern safety here. But the proponents of nuclear as a (or THE) solution generally aren't talking about this design. They're either talking more of the same-old reactor designs that are decidedly not safe for these sorts of attacks, or near-vaporware like thorium that no one actually builds in the real world.

I think safety from anything short of a nuclear attack, including insider sabotage, is essential. And the only way to do that is to build a reactor that can't fail even if its containment is destroyed. I haven't seen that design yet.

edit: I'm actually less worried about the theft of fissionable material, as commercial reactor-grade materials aren't anywhere near bomb-grade, and would need a lot of refinement (a dedicated facility) to make bombs. It's mostly a problem for state-level actors like Iran that will shuffle fissionable material from their civilian reactor projects over into secret military projects. fwiw, the reason Iran even has substantial uranium is because, in the 1970s, the US was merrily building a half-dozen civilian reactors for our good friend the Shah of Iran. So when the revolution happened in 1979, those all fell into the hands of our new most hated enemies. And 40 years later, they still have all that uranium and leftover know-how and equipment to play with. Which gets back to my whole "Do we build reactors in Yemen?" question.

Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

#100

Post by v_lisivka »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #92
v_lisivka wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chornobyl's exclusion zone covered small part of contaminated area only. My parent's home is in contaminated area, but nobody was evacuated. Cancer rate is 2.5x larger at average in four regions of Ukraine, which are near to Chornobyl. I saw 6m (20 foot) wide circle of dead grass at about 800m from my parents home, where a hot particle landed. Both my neighbors are died because of cancer. I live in clear region, but…

> Cancer rate is 2.5x larger at average in four regions of Ukraine, which are near to Chornobyl. Citation needed. WHO says up to 4000 early cancer deaths total from Chernobyl. 2.5x larger cancer fatalities would be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people which is not seen by any credible study that I'm aware of. My ex grew up in Gomel and didn't get cancer. Neither did her parents.

In Ukrainian. See graphic at page 235 (Thyroid cancer level growth since tragedy).

http://irbis-nbuv.gov.ua/cgi-bin/irbis_nbuv/cgiirbis_64.exe?...

My brothers were unable to escape. Younger brother had problems with thyroid, but survived. (I had problems with thyroid too, but at much smaller scale). Older brother had brain surgery about two months ago, but it's unknown is it helped or not yet.

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