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Ultra Safe Nuclear

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Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#141

Post by noja »

manfredo wrote: post #47
merb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. How long does it need to be kept safe? 2. How to find a storage facility that can keep it safe that long? 3. How to ensure that a facility does not contamine other stuff in X years? 4. if it is recycable why does nobody do it? 5. if it is so easy to store it safe, why does not country have a TRUE final depot? yeah coal is bad, but why compare it to coal in the first place when we want to reduce such things anyway?…

1. Forever. Uranium is a heavy metal, it's toxic regardless of it's radioactivity. 2. The US already has one [1]. Congress stopped it's opening, but it's sitting there built ready to be used. Europe also is constructing a disposal site [2] 3. Like I wrote in my comment, bury it in an area with no groundwater. 4. France does recycle it's nuclear waste. 5. We do, as I pointed out above. And for the second time, this wa…

> Forever

How can anything with a cost that lasts forever be cheaper?

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#142

Post by flyingfences »

basemi wrote: post #25

Nice animation but but... I think nuclear is bad because the technology to make it is in the hands of a few big corps. That's the major downside, and of course, toxic waste.

> the technology to make it is in the hands of a few big corps

On a practical, mass-deployable scale, this is true of any power generation technology.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#143

Post by noja »

beders wrote: post #56
manfredo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not a problem. There's actually very little of it. It occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. Storing it is pretty foolproof: bury it in an area with no aquifer. The main risk of contamination is getting into the groundwater. If there's no groundwater the risk of contamination is eliminated even if the containers decay over time. And lastly, it doesn't make sense to bur…

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

(You need to write the flaws here so someone can address each of them)

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#144

Post by evgen »

rektide wrote: post #45
3pt14159 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deaths per joule are the lowest out of any major fuel source except for maybe wind, which is debatable depending on your assumptions about the future.

Except... we don't know what the deaths are. It will take tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years to know what the death toll is from nuclear power. Because humanity is stuck with the waste for hundreds of thousands of years. We use only tiny amount of the energy available, then have waste to deal with through the ages. I'm in favor of nuclear, but wow are we ever terrible at innovating & trying to make a r…

Out of curiosity, is there a single death that is directly attributable to nuclear waste from a reactor? (want to add that last clause because I do not think nukes should get blamed for someone improperly dumping medical equipment with cobalt or cesium isotope generators) For some reason I want to assume this happened at some point, maybe back in the 50s or 60s when we were really sloppy with nuclear waste but I can't seem to find any.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#145

Post by loeg »

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…

> So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore?

1. Waste is mentioned every time one of these articles hits HN.

2. Waste is not and was never a real problem. Right now our strategy for radioactive coal waste is to aerosolize it and dump it into the atmosphere. Burying a few dirty cans in the ground has only ever been a barrier due to FUD.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#146

Post by IBCNU »

merb wrote: post #31
manfredo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not a problem. There's actually very little of it. It occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. Storing it is pretty foolproof: bury it in an area with no aquifer. The main risk of contamination is getting into the groundwater. If there's no groundwater the risk of contamination is eliminated even if the containers decay over time. And lastly, it doesn't make sense to bur…

1. How long does it need to be kept safe? 2. How to find a storage facility that can keep it safe that long? 3. How to ensure that a facility does not contamine other stuff in X years? 4. if it is recycable why does nobody do it? 5. if it is so easy to store it safe, why does not country have a TRUE final depot? yeah coal is bad, but why compare it to coal in the first place when we want to reduce such things anyway?…

`5. if it is so easy to store it safe, why does not country have a TRUE final depot?`

^it's more dangerous to transport to the TRUE final depot than it is to leave in place.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#147

Post by loeg »

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?

John Oliver does accessible introductions to subject areas for non-experts. I don't recall the segment on nuclear, but in general his pieces are high-level, attempt to be accurate, and like other pop journalism, will inevitably disappoint experts in the field.

(I don't think your ad hominems are warranted.)

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#148

Post by philipkglass »

noja wrote: post #141
manfredo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Forever. Uranium is a heavy metal, it's toxic regardless of it's radioactivity. 2. The US already has one [1]. Congress stopped it's opening, but it's sitting there built ready to be used. Europe also is constructing a disposal site [2] 3. Like I wrote in my comment, bury it in an area with no groundwater. 4. France does recycle it's nuclear waste. 5. We do, as I pointed out above. And for the second time, this wa…

> Forever How can anything with a cost that lasts forever be cheaper?

Most toxic elements last forever. That includes the toxic elements in coal ash. Both coal ash and spent nuclear fuel need indefinite safe storage. It can be cheaper to store spent nuclear fuel because it's so much more compact than fossil fuel waste.

Remember that the status quo already has a large forever-waste cost of its own. Nuclear waste is a trade off vs. other kinds of waste, and it is cheaper than the status quo.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#149

Post by evgen »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #124
agumonkey wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those of us who lived through the oil shock in the 70s are having a laugh at the 'just cut the energy supply' path. Would love to hear from people who endured the UK at the height of their 3-day week to see how keen people were about this forced change...

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#150

Post by bob1029 »

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.

Cultural changes don't fix the duck curve. Around 4-7 PM is when virtually everyone is running their HVAC the most. This is also where you are starting to lose most of your solar generation capacity. There is a solid 4-5 hours of thermal momentum that needs to be compensated for before everyone hits set point temperatures and units cycle off on the hottest days.

Unless you are proposing that we do away with basic comfort in many regions, or spend hundreds of billions of dollars tearing down every structure and re-engineering them for passive comfort, I do not think there is much choice other than to bring in more peak generation capacity or employ currently-infeasible grid scale storage.

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