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Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

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Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#181

Post by pfdietz »

p1mrx wrote: post #178
pfdietz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make hydrogen, store it underground, and have enough combustion turbines available to back up the grid. A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is about 5% of the cost of a nuclear power plant, per unit of power output.

That seems physically plausible, though it would be a lot easier if we could make methane efficiently, because we already have the infrastructure to transport and burn it.

The problem then is where do you get the carbon to make the methane. Ammonia might be a possibility, if it can be kept from escaping (toxic) or dissolving in underground water.

Yet another possibility is underground storage of high temperature heat, artificial geothermal, if you will. But it would have to be extractable with cheap equipment. Perhaps it could be used to superheat hydrogen for injection into those combustion turbines.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#182

Post by DoctorOetker »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #94
jojobas wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not be surprised. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY446h4pZdc

do you have a title so I can check it through DDG? I refuse to click the consent pop-ip on YT... EDIT: watched. An aeroplane is not a train.

And a dry storage cask is not a transportation cask

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#183

Post by nobodyandproud »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #173
strulovich wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This death per TWh calculation is naive. In reality modeling and averages are not enough here. If can tell a coal plant kills X people per year, then I can pretty safely deduce it will kill somewhere between 0.9X and 1.1X people next year. (Made up numbers, but the point holds) For nuclear, we can easily estimate with the same models the damage. One miscalculation, or one disastrous outcome can cause 50000 deaths, or…

the price of protecting many small nuclear reactors against say aeroplanes will rise per watt. I certainly agree with death per TWh calculations being naive, but for a different reason: ethics trumps metrics. If I agree to climb a roof and maintain some solar panels in exchange for money, I am risking my own life and limb. A child 100 years from now will not fall off in my place. If you agree to work in a nuclear rea…

How do you quantify the life and healthcost of the mining, “recycling”, and disposal of the PV and the battery?

PV and batteries are expected to last only three decades or a decade+, respectively.

Unlike a centralized power source, decentralized power has all of the downsides that we have today with consumer garbage. Disposal is left to the consumer, which means it’s just going into landfills.

Ethics is a strawman.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#184

Post by moneytide1 »

"Just Have A Think" put out a video about geothermal energy today. Iceland and California both have large faults they use for short distance access (3km) to the >200 Celsius available at an average depth of ~40km everywhere else in the world.

I'm not sure of the implications of drilling that deep, but since horizontal drilling is required for steam return - could it ever be an avenue down which to deploy drilling assets that were originally used for fracking? If oil prices stay depressed, and California achieves total ban of gasoline vehicles before 2035, then oil demand is going to drop more and it would be good to continue to utilize advanced drilling tech that would ultimately be able to start up a grid anywhere there is lower than average crust depths.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#185

Post by colordrops »

drivebycomment wrote: post #179
colordrops wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the-nuclea...

Where does it say the evacuated areas are off limit for hundreds of years ?

After doing a bit of searching around, it looks like 20-40 years:

https://www.brainscape.com/blog/2015/06/how-long-take-to-rec....

So one of my assumptions was incorrect - but only about Fukushima. Chernobyl is estimated at 20,000 years. So it depends on the nature of the contaminaation.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#186

Post by Lazare »

strulovich wrote: post #159
Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

This death per TWh calculation is naive. In reality modeling and averages are not enough here. If can tell a coal plant kills X people per year, then I can pretty safely deduce it will kill somewhere between 0.9X and 1.1X people next year. (Made up numbers, but the point holds) For nuclear, we can easily estimate with the same models the damage. One miscalculation, or one disastrous outcome can cause 50000 deaths, or…

> As long as the extrapolations for nuclear are prone to extreme outcomes

The extrapolations for coal are prone to very extreme outcomes, believe me. :-)

> nuclear is more unpredictable

Citation needed, I think. The impact of coal on the climate and human health is still an open question, and given the scale of its use, a small change in our estimation of impact yields very large changes down the line.

I can see arguing that a "safety factor" should be baked into calculations based on how confident we are in the models. If you can say X +/- 50%, maybe we should just assume it's 2X, just to be safe (or whatever), but iff you can say X +/- 2%, X seems like a pretty good baseline.

However, I think you greatly underestimate the uncertainty of fossil fuels , and greatly overestimate the uncertainty of the safety of nuclear power. I mean....how exactly would a nuclear power plant cause 50k deaths? Or irradiate New York City? Obviously no nuclear power plants (or any other...) are being built in the middle of Manhattan.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#187

Post by Retric »

titzer wrote: post #177
Retric wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article shows the issue. “The entire process adds about 6 percent in costs for the French.” Reprocessing is simply not cost effective due to how cheap reactor grade Uranium is.

So you are saying the reason a huge problem exists is because money? Hold the phone.

This is mostly just a problem in the minds of the general public.

Individual nuclear fuel rods get significantly less radioactive over time as short half life byproducts decay. Which makes both reprocessing and long term sequestration cheaper. Storing them for ~100 years is relatively cheap and can be funded ahead of time, so punting the issue seems quite reasonable IMO.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#188

Post by fshr »

pfdietz wrote: post #154
pdonis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes decades to build a new plant. No, it doesn't. It only takes a few years. What takes decades is resolving all the NIMBY lawsuits.

Vogtle, Summer, Flamanville 3, and Olkiluoto 3 weren't delayed by NIMBY lawsuits. They were delayed by construction screw ups. Nuclear power plants are complex, and if they are required to be constructed to high standards, delays and overruns are almost inevitable. A PV field, on the other hand, is much simpler, with much more inherent redundancy, and can tolerate construction mistakes without either safety implicati…

Three of the plants you mentioned were 40+ years ago, right? Seems a bit outdated to point to in 2020.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#189

Post by monadic2 »

nicoburns wrote: post #172
monadic2 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that the storage investment will produce something viable? Investments still have risk and nuclear can fill that hole.

It's true that there's always risk involved. As we know, that is true for nuclear as much as any other energy technology. My view on this is that we are not particularly far away from this being viable even with 2020 technology. And that this is especially true if we are creative in how we apply technology, for example by decentralising the grid and installing storage capacity in people's homes, and by being aggressi…

Sure, but the stakes are human existence on the planet. I don't know why you would turn away from solutions we already have with boundable risk.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#190

Post by arrosenberg »

dandare wrote: post #59
dv_dt wrote: post #5

The attitude on risks of radiation have little to do with the economic and technological failures of nuclear power. With multiple schedule and cost failures it seems like fission nuclear is an exercise in what is possible, but not really practical compared to what is accessible via renewables + storage and it's far less constrained financial and technological foundations.

Also let's not forget the problem of burnt fuel storage. Burned nuclear fuel will stay radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Unless we plan to offload the cost of storage to future generations - which we actually do now - nuclear power is horribly unprofitable.

It's far less of a problem than advertised. Nuclear fuel contains far more energy per kg of fuel than carbon-based, so the total stock of nuclear waste in the US could fit in a two-story warehouse the size of a football field. It doesn't make sense to store it unless we discover fusion, since at some point we will come to our senses and use that "waste" as fuel for newer reactors.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

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