Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ultra Safe Nuclear

usnc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 536 posts

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#321

Post by ajross »

dirtyaura wrote: post #281
ajross wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make bombs. And what's changed now is we have enough bombs. Seriously, even the reactors that aren't expressly breeding fuel were designed with an eye to the technology and as part of programs in the 50's-70's to build out expertise in this critical technology area of national security. Countries wanted bombs. To make bombs you need a nuclear industry. Ergo, everyone who wanted bombs built civilian reactors, witho…

This argument doesn’t hold. There are several countries such as Finland that have operated nuclear power plants for decades and do not have ambitions for nuclear bombs.

If you want to go with that argument: cite Japan, not Finland. But it doesn't have to be 100% true to be largely true. The overwhelming majority of nuclear capacity has been built out by nuclear powers or aspiring nuclear powers. And with few exceptions the end of their warhead buildout happens to correlate with the end of their megawatt buildout.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#322

Post by zyxzevn »

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…

It is only a problem for future generations...

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#323

Post by macspoofing »

ajross wrote: post #237
hairytrog wrote: post #156

Two interesting things to see here, of many. They are really planning the sites to be temporary compared to the solar/wind/ and other industrial power plants that have little or no plan for returning their sites to the original virgin soil. And two, they seem to use a molten salt loop like in concentrated solar to meet variable demand without changing the power level of the reactor, which you can't really do because…

And unlike a natural gas plant, it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost. I come to post this Same Thing every time this discussion comes up. It's not about safety. Everyone serious understand nuclear, even current technologies, is "safe enough" to be useful to build out. Nuclear is outrageously expensive , though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on…

>it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost

Except renewables can't actually replace fossil fuels. They need baseload provided by fossil fuels to be viable. They are also defuse energy sources, and so require huge surface area and lots of materials for collectors - not great for a growing world, both in population and per capita energy needs. Oh, they are variable across days, seasons and inter-year periods, but there is no battery technology coming that is able to store even enough power to a moderately sized city for a few minutes, much less the weeks it would need.

>And when we get to that last 5-10%

Try 50%.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#324

Post by tonyarkles »

bl0b wrote: post #290

Random renewable energy-related question that I've been thinking about: Specifically wrt solar, a big argument against is that it can't provide power during the night and we don't have a good way to store energy. What I'm wondering is why it's so imperative that residential/commercial properties are able to get full power from the grid 24/7? What if prices for power go way up during the night (because it can't come f…

One of the fun things I notice whenever the topic of renewables comes up is the assumption that the world around you is hospitable :). We have human populations living in areas where turning off the energy is a miserable experience, in both directions.

It’s autumn in Saskatchewan right now. The nights are getting cool enough that we’ve, sadly, had to start the furnace. Within a few months, we’re likely to start getting temperatures that drop to -40 for sustained periods, and drop to around 8h of daylight per day. Power outages in the winter are a very big deal.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#325

Post by jay_kyburz »

tdy721 wrote: post #302
jay_kyburz wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually have no idea how long waste needs to be kept out of the hands of criminals, but I assume it's "a long time". My comment was mostly facetious, but the point I was making was serious. We never really take the full cost of disposing waste and pollution into consideration. I think, when you buy a new solar panel, you should also pay the full cost to pull it apart and dispose of it as well.

That’s a carbon tax right? How much should a gallon of gas cost?

Not just carbon, but plastics and all kinds of pollution. Even the clean up of recyclables like glass and metal should be paid for upfront rather thank asking society to pickup the tab after the fact.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#326

Post by tonyarkles »

quonn wrote: post #180
V6HBGNQHU wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people die from loosing power during winters and freezing to death? How many more would that be if everyone was using solar which can't provide enough power in winter?

I doubt anyone freezes to death in the EU, US, Australia, and Canada because of loosing power in winter.

> Canada

Oh? I’m in Southern Saskatchewan, about two hours away from the US border. It reliably drops to -40 here in the winter. The vast majority of us heat our homes with natural gas furnaces, driven by electric fans. Long power outages in the winter are a very very big deal, and luckily are quite rare. A few years ago we had one that lasted about 12 hours, and the indoor temperature had dropped to about 7C. If it had continued to drop, the first thing would be damaged plumbing/flooding... followed by people who don’t have a large cache of warm clothes starting to have trouble.

Edit: oh, yeah... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#327

Post by nwah1 »

ajross wrote: post #237
hairytrog wrote: post #156

Two interesting things to see here, of many. They are really planning the sites to be temporary compared to the solar/wind/ and other industrial power plants that have little or no plan for returning their sites to the original virgin soil. And two, they seem to use a molten salt loop like in concentrated solar to meet variable demand without changing the power level of the reactor, which you can't really do because…

And unlike a natural gas plant, it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost. I come to post this Same Thing every time this discussion comes up. It's not about safety. Everyone serious understand nuclear, even current technologies, is "safe enough" to be useful to build out. Nuclear is outrageously expensive , though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on…

If it can be combined with desalination, and profitably create medical isotopes, that could help balance the books. But yea, you are right. And solar keeps getting cheaper.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#328

Post by alextheparrot »

8bitsrule wrote: post #316
alextheparrot wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly weak argument, as most of the opposition to nuclear power even before widespread renewable deployment was political, not economic. Maybe the economics have changed with renewables, but that needs to be proved rather than can be inferred by the lack of US reactors being built. Take Germany’s recent denuclearization, the efforts are completely political, there was no mention of balance sheet optim…

>most of the opposition to nuclear power even before widespread renewable deployment was political, not economic. Most of the opposition to nuclear power was about a whole lot of things other than politics or economics. Decades of quantifiable failure after failure in the environmental, construction quality, maintenance, radioactive discharge, siting-safety, and waste-handling realms, to name just a few. Everywhere t…

I agree the take above was reductive, especially in truncating the historical aspects of nuclear power, so much so that in the general case it is incorrect. Collective amnesia is not a solution to yesterday’s nightmares.

I think there is hope that the new generation of nuclear scientists and companies have learned lessons, and I support giving them regulated room to prove it. America has a lot of bad energy policy (Fracking, mountaintop mining, to name a couple in addition to your comment’s nuclear perspective) - improving on that is important, but making it worse is not acceptable (Nor am I a fan of gambling with such large minimum bets).

Irrespective of my failures, the core of the original critique I think stands insofar as the argument it was responding to was not self-sustaining.

Edit: I don’t mean to age you, but I am honestly too young to remember “Too cheap to meter”. I can see where historical memory, or the lack thereof, has colored our respective perspectives, though, in important ways

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#329

Post by cmehdy »

godelski wrote: post #318
manfredo wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern societies run on heat engines, and nuclear power is still a heat engine just with a carbon free source of heat. It's possible to run a carbon free modern society without drastic change in energy use, through using nuclear energy - France has done so successfully for decades. By comparison proposals to use renewables almost invariably involve immense amounts of energy storage which is nowhere near deliverable w…

I want to add to this because I think it is also something the gp is missing. Decarbonizing the country/world is about much more than cars and electricity. Currently it is only 60% of the problem[0]. That, and we have NO zero carbon power source, if you include lifetime emissions . None. Zip. Nada. So part of the answer is to get some of the other 40% to be included in electricity. That's things like electric stoves,…

You're completely right. I replied to the post because it mentioned nuclear but the problem is much bigger and energy consumption is only one aspect of it. We're going to need pretty much every aspect: improvements or changes in how we build and maintain infrastructure, likewise for goods, and changes in consumption patterns for at least some of the things we use and eat. We're going to have to change transportation heavily too (i.e. in Europe we should heavily focus on trains over planes for example). And of course, if we can't do all these things despite having the best research, the biggest and richest universities, the highest quality of life already etc. then why should we expect other countries to be "better" than us? (and they already are better from some angles: China is going from coal to a monstrous nuclear development about 3-4 times faster than any world power in history, and Pakistan is the only country to have exceeded its carbon goals ahead of all schedules when rich European countries like mine have asked for extensions on their failures)

I recently had a Swedish friend mentioning how his parents' country (Bangladesh) is a "mess", from a privileged position. CO2 emissions for Sweden and Bangladesh are within the same order of magnitude, despite one country having about 7 times more people than the other. Because the other one drives its economy on pretty much 7 times more energy&resources consumption. Wind won't offset that anytime soon, and Sweden is already a good player in the world of both renewables and nuclear.

One of the reasons why nuclear should pretty much be a non-debate by now is that we will still very much need oil for things that are not energy-production related until we can do better, and we'd do better than to continuous burn it off to make cars, then make them go vroom on the way to the shop, where we buy our plastic-wrapped fruit delivered from the other side of the world in the middle of winter. Inconvenient truths aren't fun, but if we don't want to have much more inconvenient ones down the road we better get used to the mildly inconvenient ones right now and actually discuss on those terms.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#330

Post by pfdietz »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #288
ajross wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unlike a natural gas plant, it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost. I come to post this Same Thing every time this discussion comes up. It's not about safety. Everyone serious understand nuclear, even current technologies, is "safe enough" to be useful to build out. Nuclear is outrageously expensive , though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on…

Picking a nit here. You wrote: > Nuclear is outrageously expensive, though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on that. Nuclear plants are expensive the way GE and Bechtel build them not inherently so. At some point I got to look at the Diablo Canyon cost-to-build breakdown and about 2/3ds of the cost were litigation, licensing, and specialized site and construction prep. Finding people who…

NuScale claimed they could build their reactor in a factory too. Then that fell apart.
Post reply on HN