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After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

forbes.com

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Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#181

Post by corty »

bob29 wrote: post #109
cbmuser wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear waste is actually the best kind of waste because of its very high density and the fact that it's solid. The density is so high that the US has accumulated just 83,000 tons over several decades operating nuclear power plants: > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... That may sound a lot but compared to coal or, in fact, any other type of power generating plant, the amount is absolutely…

> compared to coal or, in fact, any other type of power generating plant so nuclear creates less nuclear waste than PV, wind, or geothermal?

Yes. Producing semiconductors or rare earth magnets is not a very clean process, Silicon Valley has a lot of uglyness left over from such processes. Cheap renewables supplies produced in the far east are certainly not clean in that regard, and you need a lot more in mass and volume than with nuclear.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#182

Post by Lazare »

tbenst wrote: post #64

I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster. Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events: no matter how well designed, some fraction of plants will cause INES Level 7 disasters. If the resulting cost (ie $10…

> I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe.

Nuclear power is relatively safe. Nothing is 100% safe. Rooftop solar actually has a surprisingly high fatality rate from installers falling off of roofs! Fossil fuels release horrible byproducts into the atmosphere, hydro sometimes causes floods...everything has drawbacks.

> Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events

Quite right. Analysis of all power options should take into account black swan events (eg, a hydro dam failure taking out a city), but they should also do the reverse, and take into account the normal risks of operations. A coal power plant is subject to any particularly terrible catastrophic failure modes, but every day it operates it spews out a lot of carcinogens.

Imagine a system that kills 5k people once every 20 years, versus a system that kills 1 person a day. You end up with scary headlines about the first one, but the second one kills significantly more people over time.

> pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.”

The pro-nuclear arguments I have seen are much more conservative than that. They point out, correctly, that even counting Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, nuclear energy is relatively safe. If the future ends up safer than the past that would be a bonus, but the past has been shockingly safe.

Coal kills around 13k people every single year in the US alone. How many people have died due to nuclear power in the US in the entire history of nuclear energy?

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#184

Post by lucb1e »

mceoin wrote: post #44

What is the RNC's stance on nuclear? Does nuclear now enjoy bi-partisan support? Or just the Dems?

A bit meta, but as someone from Europe where the countries aren't usually divided into two opposing camps, this seems oddly phrased to me. Could someone from the USA who considers themselves either neutral or a democrat comment on whether "just the Dems" sounds negative to you?

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#185

Post by corty »

legulere wrote: post #85
reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building it makes it affordable. Giant one-off projects have endemic problems with perverse bidding incentives, cost overruns, and engineering problems. Economy of scale production absolutely dominates most industrial supply chains and engineering. The US and other modern economies got the political will together to subsidize solar when it rarely made sense on a MW/$ basis and now it's dropped to by far the cheapest…

What drives nuclear costs is generally rising construction costs. You can’t bring that down with building more nuclear power plants. PV got so much cheaper because it’s a mass producible product.

PV is also cheaper because the possibly polluting production is outsourced to china.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#186

Post by lucb1e »

Dahoon wrote: post #118

There isn't enough material to run enough nuclear plants to make a difference. This is or should really be common knowledge.

Could you elaborate or link to a source that does?

Edit: Another comment[1] says "there's more than enough for couple centuries (and new reactor designs can make one-two orders of magnitude better use of what's available)". Your statement "not enough to make a difference" seems quite different from "enough for centuries". If you think this is wrong, a bit of elaboration beyond the simple statement couldn't hurt...

They also make the point which I was going to make even if there turned out to be a significant limit to the amount of material available:

> even if we only had 100 years worth of nuclear fuel reserve, that's more than enough to fix the climate problem and fully develop renewables

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24325737

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#187

Post by rriepe »

burfog wrote: post #79
eecc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't heard a convincing protocol for long term storage of spent fuel. That's even worse than a remotely possible nuclear disaster: because unless a solution is found, it's a certainty.

The real answer is mostly "don't do that". Spent fuel rods can't be used anymore because about 5% of the uranium has been converted into elements that slow down the reaction. The remaining uranium is still good. Due to a presidential order by Carter, we waste that uranium. The process for recovering the unused uranium (called "reprocessing") is vaguely similar to the process for making bombs. We'd rather not have lot…

It's this line of thinking that ultimately pushes me to being pro-nuclear.

However, I think our optimism regarding the political situation is more misplaced than our optimism regarding the tech.

Here, you criticize Carter's order and present an alternative. A great one, even: Not having the order in place and doing the reprocessing.

But that's not reality, right? It's more likely that we'll have Carter's order and some new dumb order in the next few years. Nuclear is inherently scary and will always be politicized.

I agree somewhat regarding the overblown burial worries. But I could make a really great commercial out of the disaster scenarios involved there. They'll never not be convincing arguments.

Radiation is a silent killer. Nuclear weapons are the worst thing humanity has made. Not being afraid of nuclear power is rational only within a very narrow discussion window, one which most people simply cannot see through.

I guess my frustration here is that the pro-nuclear side constantly uses arguments that don't work and casually dismisses being afraid of the smallest and largest deadly thing. There's lots of "just" and "most" and it all feels so hand-wavy.

"We checked the numbers, we've got the worst thing under control." It's just not a convincing argument to most people. I don't know how to fix this, but it's definitely not another politicized pro/anti divide.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#188

Post by pippy »

tbenst wrote: post #64

I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster. Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events: no matter how well designed, some fraction of plants will cause INES Level 7 disasters. If the resulting cost (ie $10…

Everyone knows about chernobyl. No one knows about pike river. Yet they killed the same amount of people. Every single nuclear incident is propagandized, yet dirty energy gets a free rap. It's a shame as global warming will cause much more damage than the chernobyl exclusion zone which is essentially a nature reserve now.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#189

Post by sigotirandolas »

cure wrote: post #56
rangoon626 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was always elitist leftist “environmentalists” who were anti-nuke. They were the ones who bought into Malthusian systems that believed that the world would be over populated if nuclear energy ever reached widespread deployment. They pushed this narrative to gullible hippy “environmentalists”, who swayed public opinion and, whoops, accidentally caused us to burn another 50 years worth of coal. Yeah, “fight the man”…

> Everyone today should be absolutely livid over what happened. Why? Perhaps additional serious nuclear accidents ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... ) were avoided because nuclear plants were never built.

Almost certainly nuclear accidents & other externalities were avoided. But would those have been more costly than the costs of fossil fuels (e.g. international conflicts, tens or hundreds of gigatonnes of CO2, many other contaminants, oil spills, etc.)?

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#190

Post by bgorman »

Lazare wrote: post #182
tbenst wrote: post #64

I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster. Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events: no matter how well designed, some fraction of plants will cause INES Level 7 disasters. If the resulting cost (ie $10…

> I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Nuclear power is relatively safe. Nothing is 100% safe. Rooftop solar actually has a surprisingly high fatality rate from installers falling off of roofs ! Fossil fuels release horrible byproducts into the atmosphere, hydro sometimes causes floods...everything has drawbacks. > Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan event…

How can we know that coal kills 13k people a year in the US? Sure, burning coal releases carcinogens but most of the population lives far away from coal plants.
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