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

bbc.com

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

#301

Post by nickik »

ncmncm wrote: post #241
lightgreen wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love that Australia battery, but lets be real its tiny. Comparing that to a solution that could fully balance all solar/wind energy is a gigantic strech.

I have looked into all of these storage mechanism, and not one is actually really read for the market and is mass deployable quickly.

We just have to hope Tesla can actually spit out many tera of batteries by 2030 and the other companies match them.

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

#302

Post by glogla »

rgbrenner wrote: post #149

BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time y…

Comparing nuclear (available 24/7) with solar without storage (available only in during the day only in some seasons) seems tricky - of course the solar will be cheaper. It doesn't cover all the need though.

And storage is mostly unsolved problem at scale. Nobody in the world ever built GWh size battery.

So supporting solar means you're either suggesting going with stuff that doesn't exist (and might as well go with fusion then, right?) or you're basically supporting fossil fuels.

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

#303

Post by DoctorOetker »

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…

why the downvote?

I know of 0 incidents where terrorists did or threatened to attack a solar manufacturing plant with an aeroplane.

But we know of at least 1 incident of terrorists threatening to attack a nuclear facility with an aeroplane.

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

#304

Post by reitzensteinm »

emteycz wrote: post #285
reitzensteinm wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's how much the storage added to the price of power in the bid, not the capital cost of the batteries.

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

#305

Post by Aachen »

rgbrenner wrote: post #149

BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time y…

1. It's slightly less than 2x, not 10x.

2. Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy.

3. We'd be making actual progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.

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

#306

Post by teraku »

emteycz wrote: post #285
reitzensteinm wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just checked some prices for small scale PV farms you can plant to your house. It's 16,83 euro-cent for the PV per KWH and 23,74 euro-cent for the storage. Production is 10KWH, storage is 11KWH.

So if we (naively) multiply by 1000 we get 23,74€/MWh. And that is for the home market. I know battery storage doesn't scale linearly, but also if you were to build this as a highly-scaled farm, I'm sure prices would also drop as well.

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

#307

Post by glogla »

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.

Do we have any examples of working renewables + storage? Because as far as I know, nobody in the world ever built grid scale storage. There are no proven commercial solutions available, no expertise built.

There might not even be enough lithium on the planet to support all of this, who knows.

Relying on something unproven to swoop in and save us ... might as well wait for fusion, right? In the end, what you're doing is extending the reign of fossil fuels and destroying the world.

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

#308

Post by Nimitz14 »

rgbrenner wrote: post #149

BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time y…

The building costs are high because noone builds them. It's always expensive when each project is a "first" for the people involved.

> once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind.

Ah right that must be why electricity costs in Germany are so high and so low in France LOL

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

#309

Post by titzer »

Retric wrote: post #187
titzer wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, sure, we are lucky that the waste from nuclear reactors is primarily solid heavy metals rather than fly ash or anything else, so we can just plunk them into pools and forget about them for a while. But eventually it makes sense to do something with all that waste.

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

#310

Post by bboygravity »

Has anybody else noticed that this pro-nuclear "news" seems rather orchestrated throughout Europe/"The West"? These pro-nuclear ideas have recently been in the news and hot in politics in at least 4 European countries that I frequent and where I speak the language. All around the same time.

Is this manufacturing consent in action? Who's behind this and why?

There are no new arguments or information that I see for or against nuclear in the past few decades. And all of a sudden now "we" (as in: the main stream media) realize that "maybe nuclear isn't so bad". What is this?

Disclaimer: I personally think nuclear is the least evil of all energy conversion methods that we can currently use. But I have had this opinion for at least 15 years.

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