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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?

#281

Post by Cthulhu_ »

cwp wrote: post #74
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…

The problem with nuclear is that people are afraid of it. If we had spent the last 40 years trying to make it cheaper instead of trying to prevent accidents, it wouldn't be so expensive.

But then we'd have more accidents and people would be more inclined to ban it.

This isn't a rational numbers game; if a nuclear plant goes, the effects last for decades.

I mean compare it with transport; airplanes are safer than cars because there's just so much more training and oversight involved. But if there's a car crash, it gets (at best) a byline in a local newspaper. If there's an airplane crash, it's world news. In the US alone, 35-40 thousand people die in vehicle fatalities per year; internationally, according to https://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/en/, it's 1.35 MILLION. Death toll from planes is less than 1000 per year, worldwide (https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra...). Don't take this as fact because I just googled for a few seconds, but car accidents cause more than 1000 times as many deaths as planes.

But planes get all the media attention and all the legislation, training, safety requirements, development, etc.

I'm not sure if I'm making an actual point here, but the tl;dr is that people will not be rational about their opinion on nuclear safety vs other forms of energy.

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

#282

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

The economic reality is that battery on the grid is out-competing gas peaker plants in a lot of places because even with the current scarcity and price levels in the battery market, it seems economical to buy them by the MWH.

Technically, peak prices dropping because of solar/wind is a problem of everything else being too expensive. Battery storage solves that problem by being cheaper. Of course we'll need many TWH and the current production levels are still measured in GWH. But as we learned last week, Tesla is looking to fix that. But even at current price levels picking something expensive like lithium ion seems to make sense for some. Of course better options are possible and being worked on. But it's competitive already. We're talking about making it even more competitive.

This is actually proven technology; there are a growing number of places that have sharply reduced their conventional power generation and vastly reduced cost simply by deploying modest amounts of battery.

Basically the notion of a peaker plant seems to be reserved for recovering the sunk cost in prematurely unprofitable gas and coal plants. Building new peaker plants is not really a thing. The economic outlook for investors behind such plants is downright depressing as they can look at trends in the market and extrapolate sub 0.01 $/kwh solar prices are coming (rounded down, this already happened actually).

That's also why nuclear is not really viable because its closer to 0.1 $/kwh. That's an order of magnitude difference. It's too expensive. Too risky (financially). Too uncertain. And that's before you consider the general mood (irrational as that may be) against nuclear.

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

#283

Post by DoctorOetker »

yongjik wrote: post #233
DoctorOetker wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This thread is a quintessential anti-nuclear circular argument. Sorry for bad paraphrasing, but basically: A: Nuclear is dangerous because bad things happen if a jumbo jet crashes onto it. B: Is there anything that doesn't cause bad things when a jumbo jet crashes onto it? A: Irrelevant, these things aren't as dangerous as nuclear. I get that there are issues with nuclear. This isn't one.

did you read my comment about Southern Airways Flight 49?

its not just about things being bad when an airliner crashes, but about the additional risk incurred.

if I can choose between a nuclear power plant getting hit 10km from me, or some silane also 10km from me, I'd know what I'd dissaprove of most.

if I can choose between leaving for the next generations a location where surface storage was hit by an airliner, or where some silane gas was used being hit by an airliner, I'd know what I prefer to leave behind for them...

chemicals are easier to sort than isotopes

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

#284

Post by Manfredo_1 »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #274
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not this works. Batteries currently cost ~$150 to $250 per KWh. As in, if you want to store one kilowatt hour, you need to spend $150 to $250 dollars on batteries. If you want to store one megawatt hour, then that's $150,000 to $250,000 worth of batteries. Yes, you can cycle this battery multiple times. I'm not sure how you think that this somehow makes storage cheaper. The fact that you can charge a 1 KWh…

Parent compared the price of one MWh of power from a natural gas plant with the capital cost of building batteries that can store one MWh. This is a type error.

The enormous capital costs demonstrates how expensive it makes solar and wind in simple terms. Even if we measure in terms of cost per watt hour stored and drawn over the lifetime of the batter it's still hugely expensive. Most batteries can support 300 to 1,000 charge and discharge cycles. So in terms of overall cost of storage, that's still in the range of $200 to $700 per MWh of energy stored and drawn over the lifetime of the battery.

This point is largely moot because we don't even have the manufacturing capacity to deliver the amount of batteries required. We only build 300 GWh of batteries globally each year. To reach 12 hours of storage, the US would need 6 TWh - 20 years of global production at current production rates.

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

#285

Post by emteycz »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #271
VBprogrammer wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the cost of storage would exceed the cost of generating the same power via a CCGT plant?

I just took parent's numbers at face value to show how they were misinterpreting them. I haven't seen much in the way of true apples to apples comparisons. Most solar plants with storage don't have much storage. For instance I saw a link this week on HN for $30 + $15/MWh for solar + storage, but the storage was only one hour of the nameplate capacity. Based on the falling prices of batteries, I don't think it will be…

Are you sure it was $15/MWh? That seems more than 1000x cheaper than state of the art batteries.

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

#286

Post by glogla »

pdonis wrote: post #122
icedistilled wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Oh don't forget the other issue: It takes decades to build a new plant. We don't got that time. For the $6 Billion or more it takes to build a nuclear plant that will then take 15 to 20 years to license and build before it generates a single Watt, we could have had a $6 Billion of solar and wind deployed and operating for 12+ ye…

> 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.

Looking at this page [1] it seems China takes about 5 years to go from start of construction to commercial operation of a reactor.

I'm pretty sure they have no NIMBY lawsuits to content with, so this seems like a realistic timeframe.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China

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

#287

Post by VBprogrammer »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #282
manfredo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The economic reality is that battery on the grid is out-competing gas peaker plants in a lot of places because even with the current scarcity and price levels in the battery market, it seems economical to buy them by the MWH. Technically, peak prices dropping because of solar/wind is a problem of everything else being too expensive. Battery storage solves that problem by being cheaper. Of course we'll need many TWH a…

> The economic reality is that battery on the grid is out-competing gas peaker plants in a lot of places because even with the current scarcity and price levels in the battery market, it seems economical to buy them by the MWH.

Do you have any citation for this because I've seen no evidence that this is true. The largest grid scale lithium battery is barely a drop in the ocean by comparison to the energy consumption of the grid. It is only used for short term grid frequency stabilization, which it does admirably.

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

#288

Post by Manfredo_1 »

adrianN wrote: post #272
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A battery for 100/kwh can be used several 100 to 1000s of cycles. You're making the same error as reitzensteinm. The fact that you can charge and discharge a 1 KWh battery a thousand times doesn't make it a 1 MWh battery. If the United States wants to use 80% renewables we need 12 hours of energy storage, which works out to 6 TWh. Even at a very generous cost estimate of $100/KWh, this works out to 600 billion doll…

You can avoid a lot of storage requirements by making your grid smarter and electrifying transportation and heating. 60% renewables are possible with hardly any storage at all, certainly less than 12 hours. Shifting demand is always cheaper than storage. Once you've electrified transportation, you have hundreds of millions of car batteries that can help out with demand spikes. That distributes the high upfront cost o…

Electrifying heating doesn't improve this situation, it worsens it drastically. People come back home after work and turn on the heat or AC right as the sun goes down. A big part of why renewable generation is so high in Germany is because they mostly heat their homes with gas (which emits carbon, but doesn't factor into electricity generation statistics).

Using car batteries for storage doesn't solve the fundamental mismatch between the staggering amount of batteries that get produced and the amount of storage that is required. Not to mention, I'm dubious if this scheme would even work. Why would I hook my car storage up to the grid? It's going to eat away at the battery life of my car. This essentially just offloads the cost of battery storage to consumers by decreasing the battery life of their EVs due to the constant charge and discharging.

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

#289

Post by FooHentai »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #264
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…

I would assume wind and solar having unknown undesirable secondary effects. A nuclear power plant is fairly self-contained. A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space. Wind farms slow down wind (obviously..) We all know how important the gyres in the oceans to preserving the current ecosystem. Everything is in a delicate balance, if we start messing up somethi…

>A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space.

Nuclear plants take energy sequestered in matter and unleashes it to a form that ultimately will decay to heat just the same. This outcome is the same regardless of the power source.

If climate change is a relevant concern to the discussion then alongside discussing of sustainable energy there's an equal topic of how we re-sequester or eject the additional energy we've so far pumped into the atmosphere in the form of energy decaying to heat. Not to mention how to curb our energy demands so that we don't continue to worsen the situation.

>Wind farms slow down wind (obviously..)

Yeah quite a lot on the scale of large farms, slowing wind speeds by up to 50%. The optimist in me thinks this could be a beneficial thing given our atmosphere is generally expected to become more chaotic with stronger winds as a result of climate change, but the realist in me thinks it's largely irrelevant since turbines can't operate during the extremes, which are expected to become more commonplace.

>Are there any studies in this area?

Not sure, but it's an interesting question.

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

#290

Post by DoctorOetker »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #230
DoctorOetker wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Cra…

is cadmium still even used for new solar panels?
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