Ultra Safe Nuclear • Hacker News Board

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#121

Post by throwaway894345 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #54

throwaway894345 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The glaring problem (pun intended) with solar and wind is that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow and we don't have a good way to store energy for those sunless and windless intervals.

We do have a good way to store energy. It's called batteries, they are already cost effective in several use cases, and their cost is going down about 5% per year.

Critically, batteries aren't cost effective for the use case in question: storing solar and wind energy in a world where these are the primary energy sources. They're going down 5% per year, but who knows how long that trend will hold, especially if we're talking about a wide-scale switch to unreliable power sources (driving up the demand for batteries).

I want to live in a world powered by solar and wind, but we can't just wish away the reliability issues. And I don't think we should keep burning fossil fuels while we chip away at the storage problem. And we don't have to--we can build nuclear plants while we work on the storage problem.

As an aside, I think it would be really cool if something like Energy Vault (https://energyvault.com/) could be the solution (at least for the majority of use cases); however, I have no idea how feasible it is.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#122

Post by shakezula » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

nimish wrote: post #18

Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it. The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free! The wind -- caused by solar heating -- also generates free power. The cost of harvesting it is now so low, and will always continue to decline as any technology will, that any fuel-based generation mechanism is going to be rendered uneconomic…

Nuclear is the only way we’re going to be able to get ahead of climate change. Renewables do not have the energy density required at this point. In the 70s? Sure, we might have been able to get ahead of it. At this point, we’re going to need nuclear whether we like it or not. Nuclear is the only option that will provide enough power to both scrub out existing carbon from the atmosphere and reduce our output of carbon while we do it.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#123

Post by yongjik » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

xibalba wrote: post #3

Assuming nuclear truly can be ultra safe, how do you convince a public that has seen Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to get on board? Particularly when the "competition" (solar, wind, etc) has such a strong tailwind.

Ever heard of Kessennuma [1]? You probably don't remember the name. When the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake hit, an oil tank ruptured, caught fire, and burnt for four days. According to [2], 1,152 people were killed, with additional 214 missing. That's a similar level as Fukushima's expected casualties, probably more.

But nobody talks about Kessennuma, and nobody brings it up as an evidence that fossil fuels are an inherently dangerous technology that must be purged from the earth to protect our children. Because, apparently, dying in an oil fire is not scary enough.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesennuma

[2] https://www.kesennuma-memorial.jp/english/

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#124

Post by Manfredo_1 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #120

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sun and wind are both very low energy density, and are intermittent sources. The sun is only available for part of the day, and wind is highly variable in a short term time frame. The real cost of using renewables for a primary source of energy is the cost of storage. Using renewables for 80% of our energy demand would require 12 weeks of storage - to get to 100% it would take 3 weeks of storage [1]. These are st…

what about cultural changes ? serious question. less living at night, less energy consumption, making sun randomness a bit less of an issue. Just asking.

By "cultural changes" you mean energy shortages. Realistically, this would most likely result in leaders getting elected out of office and resuming the use of fossil fuels. Regular blackouts are immensely unpopular.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#125

Post by whatshisface » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #52

whatshisface wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Investing in any such generator needs to be for other reasons like land scarcity. Yeah, there's no upper limit on energy usage. In several decades, mark my words, we will have a solar panel related deforestation problem.

This is mathematically impossible. The entire world could be powered with 200,000 square miles of solar panels. Since 1990 we’ve lost ~2.5x that amount of land to deforestation, approximately zero of which was due to building solar. We have a deforestation problem, but it has nothing to do with solar.

Using present-day numbers to say that solar deforestation will not be a problem is just as fallacious as using today's temperature to say that global warming is not a problem.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#126

Post by jbob2000 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #87

gruez wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free! except you know, the solar panels. by the same logic you can you can capture fission power for free, all you need is set up the reactor.

There was a comment here about cleanup costs of nuclear vs. solar, that was deleted while I was typing my response to that. I'm just gonna copy in my response here, because I think it's an interesting topic: Are we really sure solar panels are much easier to dismantle on a euro-per-kWh basis though? That is, if you divide the total cost of dismantling and recycling a solar power plant, divided by the total amount of…

Solar panels aren't the only way to generate energy using the sun. You can build a concentrated solar farm (see: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/06/motorsport/morocco-solar-...) which uses mirrors and salt to produce up to 580mw of power, with a cost of just under $1bil.

My neighbor heats their pool using solar, it's just a bunch of tubes that cycle water over their roof. They got rid of their gas heater. Given that most backyard pools are used in the summer, why can't we swap these to using solar?

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#127

Post by tomatotomato37 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

slezyr wrote: post #80

nimish wrote: post #18

Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it. The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free! The wind -- caused by solar heating -- also generates free power. The cost of harvesting it is now so low, and will always continue to decline as any technology will, that any fuel-based generation mechanism is going to be rendered uneconomic…

> The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free! Are going to clean solar panels/mirrors for free? > Bahawalpur is desert terrain , having high dust count, therefore, the efficiency of panels were reduced by 40%. It required 30 people to clean panels with 15 days to restore the panels back to their full capacity, which reduced production of ins…

30 workers isn't a lot for a power plant. According to this article[0] (ignore the coal stuff) a decent gas turbine plant takes ~25 workers to keep it running, and that's for a system whose energy source can just be piped in rather than having to be constantly babysat so it doesn't irradiate the tri-county area. That's kinda the flaw of a steam turbine based system; it doesn't matter if the heat comes from coal, uranium, concentrated solar, whatever, you still need people around to make sure the system with superheated steam and a big heavy turbine spinning really, really fast doesn't go wrong.

[0]https://www.powermag.com/supporting-coal-power-plant-workers...

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#128

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

ceilingcorner wrote: post #60

I find it a little odd that a site called Hacker News is so bullish on nuclear power. Could there be anything less hacker than a centralized, exclusively government owned and operated source of power? No thanks. I’d rather put more resources into solar, wind, and other sources of power that don’t depend on the government to not explode and irradiate the immediate area for hundreds of years.

[deleted]

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#129

Post by Pfhreak » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

evgen wrote: post #74

beders wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it's not a problem. Have you seen John Oliver's piece about that and can you point out the flaws?

Are you actually trying to use an ill-informed rant by a mid-tier comedian as the primary support for your argument? Seriously?

Wait, we're better than this on HN. If you have concerns about an argument being made it's important to articulate the concerns. Pointing out someone's career/reputation is an appeal to authority, and a form of bias.

It's possible that a comedian could be well informed from a staff, for instance, doing research. I am not familiar with John's arguments, but I wanted to address that dismissing him out of hand seems perfunctory.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#130

Post by cmehdy » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 7:51 PM UTC

jka wrote: post #24

grawprog wrote: post #8

So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? It was a pretty big thing in the 90's, now it seems to get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing. It's mot just meltdowns and containment breaches that are a problem with nuclear power. None of the renewable alternatives produce radioactive waste that needs to be stored and dealt with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rad…

I don't know, and I have been wondering whether much of the evident pro-nuclear lobbying recently (it seems apparent on many threads here related to energy generation) might be due to the nuclear industry being in serious threat of becoming obsolete. I've harped on about this many times before, but the levelized cost of energy[1] for renewables like solar and wind power is substantially cheaper than nuclear power now…

I'll alleviate your concerns: it is not due to a big nuclear conspiracy aiming at making Big Nuclear fill its pockets, but by people who look at what physics dictates and notice that with our energy consumption things just don't add up. So you will see an increasing amount of (1) posts about nuclear, and (2) posts about de-growth or accepting to shrink economies through less consumption and production, not because there's a malevolent lobby but because people are becoming increasingly alarmed at the fantastically huge wave of problems already present due to climate change, and are acknowledging that the biggest mid-term effect is CO2 emissions (short term is water vapour and methane for what it's worth).

Side note: if you pick a conspiracy to get rich or defend "big money" interests or get swindled by, you're way better off continuing to side with oil and coal and denying that climate change is a thing - since nuclear takes gigantic initial investments and is not stock-market friendly but much more about countries' political will (and I got downvoted on previous discussions where I brought that up).