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We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

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Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#91

Post by pydry »

arcticbull wrote: post #42
brazzy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy fucking shit are you nuclear fanboys delusional (or well paid).

No my dude, you can find yourself on the other side of an argument without your opponents needing to be well-paid and delusional ;) Nuclear energy accounts for about 6% of the world's energy mix. It is the safest source of carbon-free energy in terms of deaths per TWh in the world, leading to half a many deaths as industrial solar, 1/4 as many as wind and 1/10th as many as rooftop solar. [1] The genuinely tiny amount…

4,000 is a conservative estimate. http://www.chernobylreport.org suggests 30,000 to 60,000. Cancer deaths are hard to attribute while workers falling off the roof installing solar equipment... not so much.

With Chernobyl it's also worth bearing in mind how much worse it could have been easily if the cleanup workers hadn't done their jobs right:

"There was a moment when there was the danger of a nuclear explosion, and they had to get the water out from under the reactor, so that a mixture of uranium and graphite wouldn't get into it - with the water, they would have formed a critical mass. The explosion would have been between three and five megatons. This would have meant that not only Kiev and Minsk, but a large part of Europe would have been uninhabitable. Can you imagine it? A European catastrophe."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/apr/25/energy.u...

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#92

Post by est31 »

DennisP wrote: post #89
aplummer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define short term; I think by the time a reactor you start today comes online, we are already pretty screwed

It's clear that right now we should roll out wind and solar as fast as we can. However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

Nuclear power isn't very "dispatchable", it takes long times to be turned on vs off. But it might be useful for seasonal use in the winter when there is less sun.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#93

Post by est31 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #52
tertiary wrote: post #30

First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also…

> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants? EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a…

Well the currently deployed, old nuclear plants certainly aren't as safe as the new, unbuilt ones the nuclear proponents always like to showcase. Even if you decide towards using nuclear in the future, you should build new reactors from scratch using those new safer designs.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#94

Post by arcticbull »

pydry wrote: post #91
arcticbull wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No my dude, you can find yourself on the other side of an argument without your opponents needing to be well-paid and delusional ;) Nuclear energy accounts for about 6% of the world's energy mix. It is the safest source of carbon-free energy in terms of deaths per TWh in the world, leading to half a many deaths as industrial solar, 1/4 as many as wind and 1/10th as many as rooftop solar. [1] The genuinely tiny amount…

4,000 is a conservative estimate. http://www.chernobylreport.org suggests 30,000 to 60,000. Cancer deaths are hard to attribute while workers falling off the roof installing solar equipment... not so much. With Chernobyl it's also worth bearing in mind how much worse it could have been easily if the cleanup workers hadn't done their jobs right: "There was a moment when there was the danger of a nuclear explosion, and…

4,000 is not a conservative estimate.

It is based on the UNSCEAR report, which I consider to be the authoritative source. The following WHO write-up provides a full breakdown by category. [1] The 30-60K number is scaremongering. The UNSCEAR report is about 600 pages and took 20 years to compile, and included 8 intergovernmental organizations and all the local affected governments.

"Alongside radiation-induced deaths and diseases, the report labels the mental health impact of Chernobyl as 'the largest public health problem created by the accident' and partially attributes this damaging psychological impact to a lack of accurate information." [1] This was a material problem, as many people killed themselves believing they were "contaminated" when, in reality, that were just fine.

As the link covers (both yours and mine), the primary cancers attributable to Chernobyl are thyroid cancer, due to radioactive iodine. Thyroid cancers have a 99% survival rate. This is curiously omitted in your link. Thankfully, I-131 has a half-life of just 8 days and is long, long gone.

Major incidents should not, in my opinion, dominate the discourse. After all, we're fine with hydro power when the Bangqiao Dam incident killed up to 200,000 people in one fell swoop. A single dam failure could easily cause drastically more harm than a nuclear incident.

> "Can you imagine it? A European catastrophe."

26% of all power generated in Europe comes from nuclear today. Luckily, they have learned from their mistakes and improved processes and safety measures.

[edit] The discrepancy in your link I suspect comes from this: "Excess cancer deaths can be estimated from published collective doses."

Further, I suspect the actual extent of future deaths will be lower than even UNSCEAR. They support the "linear no-threshold dose response" model, where any amount of increased radiation exposure leads to a proportional increase cancer deaths. However, this model is being challenged, as experimental evidence shows this is not consistent with biological and experimental data [2].

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/05-09-2005-chernobyl-th...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2663584/

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#95

Post by runarberg »

api wrote: post #49
tertiary wrote: post #30

First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also…

One thing I seldom see brought up is that different energy sources work best in different places. Solar works great in the Southwest. In the upper Midwest where it snows and is overcast a lot? Maybe not so much. Wind works better there, but wind may not be enough alone and requires even more storage as it usually peaks out of phase with peak demand.

There is also geothermal energy (Alaska, West Coast, Rockies; I assume we are talking solely the USA here) and hydroelectric power (Alaska, West Coast, South East, and more).

But we often don’t talk about the energy wasted in bad location of industries. E.g. growing water demanding crops in the Mid-West or South East instead of California where water is scarce, or energy intensive industries in Alaska (where energy is plentiful) instead of Texas where it is scarce.

Another thing not mentioned is wasted energy because of lacking infrastructure. This also applies to the rest of the world. A good example is not building high speed rail connection between high travel areas, so people use polluting air travel instead, another is lack of waste management facilities so garbage is left to rot instead of reused or recycled lowering demand for making the same thing again in a far away facility.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#97

Post by sradman »

> Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs...

No they don't, but they do blow up like industrial hydrogen gas explosions. Loss of coolant accidents are unforgiving in boiling water reactors and quickly fail catastrophically (in the engineering sense).

> the 1950s design CANDU reactor is small enough to be considered “modular”

Ummm, no. I stood in front of reactor #4 at Darlington just before it went into production. I think this was the last CANDU reactor to go into service in Canada. The scale of the reactor, the turbine hall, and the containment building are incomparable to anything else man-made that I've experienced.

The large size compared to equivalent boiling water reactors accounts for the CANDU's primary failing: it costs too much. Especially in the age of fracking, nuclear is uncompetitive cost wise compared to natural gas.

The supporters of nuclear energy and The Green New Deal both rely on a working assumption that the cost of CO2 emissions is the only important factor moving forward. Geographic and geopolitical considerations may play a significant role in continental Europe, Japan, and China but I have yet to hear a reasonable non-ideological argument against a natural gas centric strategy in North America.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#99

Post by jabl »

joncrane wrote: post #51
bob1029 wrote: post #20

Nuclear providing all of our base electrical generation needs, as well as co-generation applications like cooling & heating, is an obvious engineering slam dunk. I think there are also some incredible synergies that can emerge with electric cars and batteries. Just a little bit of distributed storage (e.g. Tesla car in your garage back-feeding your home periodically) could potentially obviate the need for peak genera…

I remember a Popular Mechanics cover that indicated that soon, Nuclear reactors would be powering houses and even cars. I don't believe there's a practical limitation that means that a ship has to be huge to be nuclear powered. The limiting factor on cargo ship size is the Panama Canal; there's even a name for it, "Panamax." (Note, there are ships that are larger (Post-Panamax), as well as Suezmax but they are obviou…

Nuclear reactors per se can be made pretty small, e.g. research reactors typically have a maximum (steady state) power output of a few hundred kW (roughly a car engine). OTOH the minimum economic size is probably somewhat larger.

I would imagine there's similar issues as with nuclear power plants on land, that is, to get the best return on the invested capital you want to run them with as high capacity factor as possible. So some short-range ship that spends a large fraction of its time in port is probably a poor match, whereas a trans-oceanic liner with quick turnarounds, like a container ship, could make for a good fit.

Nowadays there's "New Panamax", after a new set of locks opened in 2016 enabling (much) bigger ships.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#100

Post by epistasis »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #28
pydry wrote: post #7

Why Renewables Aren't the Reason for California Blackouts: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew... LCOE of various energy sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... https://neon.energy/Hirth-Ueckerdt-Edenhofer-2015-Integratio... suggests that wind energy has up to 50% higher "real" cost than typical LCOE measurements because of variability, however, this still put…

Is the higher cost for nuclear related to the high regulation put in place? Are the low costs for solar and wind using subsidies and considering lifetime/replacement/disposal? Don’t know. Actually asking.

And to address the other half of your question, the lower costs for solar and wind take into account the lifetime of the generation, and it's usually measured by the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) which is roughly the lifetime cost divided by the lifetime energy output. This does not take into account the value of the time that energy is delivered, so LCOE is not directly comparable for renewables and dispatchable generation like natural gas (though a huge percentage of the new solar and wind deploys for the next 5 years are adding storage to convert them into dispatchable resources.)

As for the disposal costs, that's a fairy trivial problem. Solar panel recycling has not really started because there's not many dead panels to recycle; lifetimes are tending to be longer than expected. However as there is a larger source of retired solar panels, those attempting to recycle them will get a better feel for the costs of construction of new panels from raw materials versus recycled magerials.

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