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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?

#221

Post by opo »

jhayward wrote: post #141
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #77

I can’t really reconcile people who genuinely, in their heart of hearts, believe we’re on the precipice of doom because of carbon emissions, and are at the same time strongly against nuclear power. Can someone who feels this way chime in and help me understand? I’m genuinely curious how these two ideas fit together.

We can build a lot more carbon free generation, much quicker, and reduce the carbon load of the atmosphere quicker by never ever building anther nuclear plant and instead use that money for renewables, transmission, and storage. It is simple. There are cheaper and quicker, and lots less risky ways to decarbonize generation.

>...use that money for renewables, transmission, and storage.

If grid storage was simple or easy, it would have become ubiquitous decades ago. To deal with seasonal variations in power output, would require new massive battery systems that could store power for months and/or a massive over buildup of power generation. Neither of these options would be cheap and it isn’t clear how the cost would compare with building nuclear power plants. More importantly, nobody has yet tried to build such a long term grid storage system. (And no, using natural gas to cover for shortfalls from power sources that are intermittent is not a long term answer.)

Many people also ignore how expensive and time-consuming it would be to rebuild the grid so that for example, the southwest could provide solar power for the east coast. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet.

It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

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

#222

Post by MertsA »

mrtksn wrote: post #112
corty wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The failed ones were known to be dangerous. Mostly that big problem was kept under radar of the public, oversight failed big time or was complicit. The other big problem is, we keep running old rustbuckets and dubious designs. More than half of the worlds reactors should probably be shut down immediately, and most of the rest is also due for a replacement very very soon.

How do we know that this time is different? See, the thing that goes wrong doesn’t have to be even a technological one. Fission is a process that spontaneously can go wrong unless harnessed by systems that are built by thousands of people. Anything can go wrong and anyone can screw up. All can happen and the same time as demonstrated by the previous disasters. You say that the current reactors are very dangerous and…

Your narrative sounds like you're claiming that we didn't learn from Chernobyl and that Fukushima is proof of that. That's not true, no one is going around claiming that ancient designs are somehow becoming safer and safer. Fukushima was constructed literally before Chernobyl was. Back then generation II reactors took an active approach to safety. Operators might have to take action and power to the plant needed to be always available in order to safely manage some faults. They took the approach of "lets get five redundant diesel generators and have triple redundant control cabling, sensors, and valves" whereas newer Generation IV reactors are passively safe when things go wrong. Even on the AP1000 which was approved by the NRC back in 2005 is passively safe even in a plantwide blackout with a gravity based evaporative cooling system that can last 72 hours before needing an additional source of water to fill it back up. Around 72 hours after shutdown the decay heat should be able to boil a little over a gallon per second of 30C water. All things considered it's pretty trivial to get a gallon per second of water to the reactor within 3 days time. The new SMR from NuScale that just got approved is even better given that the pool the reactor sits in is sized large enough that by the time the water in the pool is gone it'll have reduced to the point where it's cold enough to just air cool the reactor so it's passively safe indefinitely.

Even in the case of Fukushima, I'd like to point out that all things considered, zero people died from acute radiation poisoning and IIRC only one case of lung cancer was likely attributed to exposure from Fukushima. Fukushima was basically a worst case scenario for any Gen II reactor. The only reason Chernobyl was so much worse was because of the incredibly unsafe design out of the USSR. They didn't care, they didn't bother with a containment building at all, had operators blindly following orders from management even more incompetent than the operators were, operated the reactor way outside of the limits that were placed on the reactor by removing all the control rods which was never supposed to be done, etc. You can pin Fukushima on the Nuclear industry, Chernobyl was solely because of the callous indifference and incompetence of the USSR.

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

#223

Post by DoctorOetker »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #218
DoctorOetker wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who cares about the surface storage temperature? a dirty bomb can deny access to surrounding areas for prolonged times. theres so many potential failure points, here is another: if they fly through the electric pylons and into the cooling tower, there is no place to dump the energy as the reactor can't be shut down immediately, and cooling will fail soon, ...

> who cares about the surface storage temperature? a dirty bomb can deny access to surrounding areas for prolonged times. A dirty bomb is a device specifically designed to disperse radioactive material. Spent nuclear fuels is actually much less harmful than the isotopes that could be used in a dirty bomb, and it's potential for dispersal is much less in a ground collision than in an atmospheric detonation. Nuclear wa…

A terrorist is not likely to select a solar manufacturing plant as a target.

What chemicals would you be talking about? silane gas is explosive, but burns to water and silicon dioxide...

> These kinds of scenarios are borderline absurd

So absurd, the US government gave the hijackers of Southern Airways Flight 49 $2 million ..., about as absurd as an earthquake and a tsunami flooding some emergency generators...

Good luck with Mohr's circle...

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

#224

Post by Lutzb »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #125
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…

Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the…

In Germany the concept of "Ewigkeitskosten" ist factored in for coal and nuclear.

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

#225

Post by jakeogh »

jojobas wrote: post #196
DoctorOetker wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1) A train is a nastier impactor than a plane, which is mostly air, soft-ish metal and plastic. 2) What's your point? You can kill way more people by flying an airplane into a building than any nuclear facility.

Re: Aircraft impacts https://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/pret...

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

#226

Post by Lutzb »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #156
jhayward wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has cut coal use in half since the wind-down of the nuclear fleet began. Please do not repeat misinformation.

And they would have cut it to zero by now if they left nuclear plants alone.

That is factully incorrect. Even if Germany had left nuclear on a level of 1995 and replaced aging plants with new plants of the same capcity the net nuclear output combined with renewables would not be enough to offset coal/gas/oil. See https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung

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

#227

Post by jojobas »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #219
jojobas wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dry storage casks are embedded in some seriously thick concrete for radiation shielding. I wouldn't be surprised if a direct hit of an A-380 engine at Mach 1 didn't actually destroy it. Again, if you have a highjacked plane on hand you can cause way more damage by crashing it into a skyscraper than some nuclear waste storage - it's a somewhat different risk but not a greater one.

How thick? Check out these, with humans for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_dry_storage.jpg

Some 70 cm. That's right, about half of diameter of these cylinders are concrete walls.

For comparison, Schwerer Gustav shells weighed about the same as A380 engine, were mostly hardened solid steel, arrived on target at about Mach 2 and could penetrate some 7 meters of concrete (including the explosive charge).

You can help yourself to a F-4 vs concrete test that doesn't really make a dent in about 1m of concrete.

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

#228

Post by redis_mlc »

sto_hristo wrote: post #22

Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami. Being anxious about it is more than justified, especially with idiotic countries in mind. But that doesn't mean we need to abandon it. Nuclear is the future and there is no debate a…

> Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami.

Stop being an apologist for Fukushima.

It was entirely preventable:

1) Any SV Data Center auditor would have asked, "Explain the backup generators, fuel systems and resupply to me.", then immediately busted the audit for Fukushima. Would have cost less than $20,000. So we know that "nuclear regulators" are complete idiots.

2) It was built on a known-tsunami coastline with warning markers on the beaches built after the previous tsunamis. But there's no replacement for common sense.

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

#229

Post by arrosenberg »

pfdietz wrote: post #207
arrosenberg wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is plenty of land. The notion that land constraints seriously limit solar is an oft-repeated canard. I mean, I guess that's technically true, but not all land is made the same - solar is obviously going to be more productive in California, Arizona and Florida than it will be in Washington or Maine. I'm also not arguing that we can't do it because of land — it's poor land use, and works counter to the goal of…

Yes, not all land is the same. I think people who worry about land are thinking about the land they see every day, which is in populated areas. They don't think about the vast quantities of very cheap land outside those urban areas. > How many ecosystems should be destroy by covering it in panels, Many fewer than were destroyed covering far vaster areas with farms. > How do you figure? You are going to have transmiss…

> Many fewer than were destroyed covering far vaster areas with farms.

How is that relevant? You can't eat solar power, and we can't grow enough food indoors to replace farms. It doesn't make sense to compare the energy, agricultural, or land use needs of early 1800s America to 2020 America. Completely different ballgame.

> That doesn't contradict the point I made.

Your point require more explanation than you've given if it's a serious one. It's not clear how solar is going to magically need less land use for transmission infrastructure.

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

#230

Post by Manfredo_1 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #223
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who cares about the surface storage temperature? a dirty bomb can deny access to surrounding areas for prolonged times. A dirty bomb is a device specifically designed to disperse radioactive material. Spent nuclear fuels is actually much less harmful than the isotopes that could be used in a dirty bomb, and it's potential for dispersal is much less in a ground collision than in an atmospheric detonation. Nuclear wa…

A terrorist is not likely to select a solar manufacturing plant as a target. What chemicals would you be talking about? silane gas is explosive, but burns to water and silicon dioxide... > These kinds of scenarios are borderline absurd So absurd, the US government gave the hijackers of Southern Airways Flight 49 $2 million ..., about as absurd as an earthquake and a tsunami flooding some emergency generators... Good…

> A terrorist is not likely to select a solar manufacturing plant as a target.

A terrorist is not likely to select a nuclear power plant's dry storage either. Again, a terrorist stands to kill far more people crashing a plane into a building than either dry cask storage or solar panel manufacturing planet.

> What chemicals would you be talking about? silane gas is explosive, but burns to water and silicon dioxide

Crashing a plane into inert concrete casks is too great a risk but crashing into a plant with explosives is fine? And depending on the type of solar panel being crated, manufacturing could involve cadmium and other materials that could easily pose a cancer risk on par with the uranium in the dry storage casks. And I doubt these materials are as well secured.

> So absurd, the US government gave the hijackers of Southern Airways Flight 49 $2 million

The plane itself is more expensive than the $2M. I doubt the authorities' decisions would have been different if the hijackers threatened to fly into the nearest skyscraper. And by the way, the hijackers threatened to crash into the reactor not the dry storage casks.

> about as absurd as an earthquake and a tsunami flooding some emergency generators

Earthquakes are real concerns, planes flying into dry storage casks are not. There's no Mohr's circle here, only increasingly bizarre scenarios about how someone might compromise dry storage casks (coupled with handwaving away the fact that there are far more dangerous things a person could do with a hijacked plane, like fly it into an occupied building).

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