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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?

#241

Post by ncmncm »

lightgreen wrote: post #194
rgbrenner wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

solar/wind + batteries is now cheaper than coal and nuclear. And it can be brought online faster with virtually no safety issues. Nuclear had it's day and it's over. At this point subsidizing it is just creating a mess so that we can give money to GE et al for providing something that--thanks to technology--has no value. If you really want to, just give GE the money directly so that we won't have to bother decommissi…

Do you have evidence that batteries are cheaper than say nuclear? I only heard of the opposite, batteries are prohibitively expensive.

Batteries are only the most of expensive of many candidates for energy storage.

But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate.

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

#242

Post by AngryData »

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…

Even Fukushima was a human problem, they had the warnings, the designs, the technology, the reviews, and the equipment to prevent a meltdown. But newer safety features were never implemented due to political problems and concerns. They knew Tsunamis bigger than the plant was designed for could happen, they knew earthquakes bigger than the plant could handle could happen, they had the technology and knowledge to reduce or eliminate those problems so it wouldn't melt down, they just didn't bother doing any of the work to accomplish it.

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

#243

Post by AngryData »

dv_dt wrote: post #39
raffraffraff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whereas with lovely coal and oil we get to ignore the problem. It's just smoke until... Catastrophic climate feedback loops, mass extinction, hundreds of millions of climate migrants escaping uninhabitable parts of earth, coral and shellfish disappear in acidic oceans, entire ecosystems collapse and etc etc. But nuclear had costs. Sure. But we could at least begin to calculate those costs.

Why does the answer always reply with coal and oil instead of Renewables and storage?

Because nobody has put forth any workable plan to provide the storage capacity needed to rely on solar or wind.

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

#244

Post by 7952 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #90
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, its a bit like discussing systemd in that way. I suspect small modular nuclear reactors will find their niche for islands etc., but renewables + batteries will win due to cost reasons.

Okay you win, systemd as nuclear power is pretty epic. :-) That said, there is something about nuclear power that is puzzling. Sure it has a lot of fearmongering but it is very well supported by folks who create these sorts of false narratives. Kind of like conspiracy theories to me, how to they continue to exist when the narrative is clearly incorrect in the presence of all the facts? I had a professor at USC who wa…

There are lots of good reasons why mega-projects fail or under-perform that nuclear is hardly immune to. In fact the complexity, scale and grandeur of nuclear may make it particularly susceptible.

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

#245

Post by ncmncm »

johnisgood wrote: post #192
HarryHirsch wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the nuclear waste problem. Nuclear reprocessing looks nice on paper, but the technical implementation is problematic, it's chemistry but in a radioactive environment. If something catches on fire there's problems.

What nuclear waste problem? "Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immo…

There will be no useful fusion power produced on Earth in this century, at least in a Tokamak.

Tokamak fusion is a jobs program for high neutron flux physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. It does not need to produce other results.

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

#246

Post by pas »

manfredo wrote: post #203
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…

> Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it? Compete against fossil fuels? No, but neither can solar and wind. Nuclear power also loses out against…

Just a day ago someone on HM mentioned that the Diablo Canyon plant is being shut down because it would need a 7B USD cooling system (evaporation towers), and building 40 GWh storage would cost less.

(I found this ~400 USD / kWh for 4 hours number, that gives 17.5 GW for 4 hours for 7B. by W Cole at NREL.)

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

#247

Post by AngryData »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #202
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…

I read somewhere that Fukushima's natural disaster wad a "once in 50-years event" which is like saying it's not your fault if you run a particular stop sign every day for 20 years because "the was only a 1% chance of someone coming the other way"

They could have stopped running the stop sign at any point because they knew it was a problem for decades. They just decided it was too inconvenient to stop despite the constant protests of the passengers.

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

#248

Post by roenxi »

rgbrenner wrote: post #169
ComputerGuru wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your post conveniently ignores solar/wind + batteries, which is even cheaper than coal.

Those are held to a much lower standard. I've seen people on HN seriously argue that we need to isolate nuclear waste from the biosphere for multiple generations, including contingencies for the collapse of English as a comprehensible language.

What is the plan to isolate the poisonous meals in a solar panel for multiple generations? There isn't one. It just goes in landfill, I expect with relatively little concern for if it is setting up the next Flint, Michigan scenario.

I doubt any form of energy would be economic if it was held to the same standards as Nuclear. It is perfectly safe, has proved itself to be perfectly safe now that we have 50 years of evidence and then the operators have to spend however much it takes to make it safer than that. This impossible task turns out to be hellishly expensive.

There are literally 2 or 3 stories where there was a bad meltdown, and even then the damage seems to be comparable to having used coal over the same period of time. Worst-case scenario with 40 year old reactor designs is comparable to business as usual, and people start arguing over if that is safe enough.

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

#249

Post by 7952 »

arrosenberg wrote: post #199
pfdietz wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of land. The notion that land constraints seriously limit solar is an oft-repeated canard. You can see this by either comparing the land needed to the land available, or by comparing the cost of land to the cost of the equipment that is put on the land. Nuclear's land use typically ignores the land used by the distribution network for its power. If you add that in, the land ratio of solar vs. nuclear…

> 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…

The ground under solar panels is not just lost. Things can still grow, and can be a more valuable ecosystem than intensive farmland.

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

#250

Post by chjdev »

johnmorrison wrote: post #201
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 energy is regularly significantly (usually more than an order of magnitude, from what I've seen) cheaper for electricity than any other source in comparable countries (e.g. nuclear electricity in Toronto >10x cheaper than coal/solar electricity in Berlin) Nuclear energy is and always has been inherently competitive on total profitability over the course of a plant's lifetime. The main issue is the time it tak…

do you have a source for the >10x? because that was my assumption as well, but after reading through [0-3] i'm pretty amazed how cheap solar and wind have become over the last years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1] https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/solar-power-cost-decrease-... [2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

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