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Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#271

Post by throwawaygulf »

gdubs wrote: post #175

I read Stewart Brand's 'Whole Earth Discipline' about five years ago, and came away pretty convinced by his pro-nuclear arguments. The price situation has definitely changed dramatically in the last few years, with solar dropping remarkably. So some of it may be worth revisiting. But that said, something else has happened in the last five years that has made me a bit ... cautious about being decisive on nuclear. And…

>And that is general global instability. E.g., things sure feel like they've come off the rails recently and things I used to take for granted: that competent people would generally be in charge, has been challenged.

There's almost never been a safer time to be alive, and there have been incompetent leaders since time immemorial.

Not even a lifetime ago incompetent leadership caused tens of millions of people to perish because they thought killing all the birds would save more of their crops, among other things.

You've been living in a bubble and/or have been ignoring history, even recent history.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#272

Post by nicoburns »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #184
BillyTheKing wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be of the same opinion, but I gotta say that Fukushima really did have an impact on me (on the long-run, it didn't have an immediate impact). But I have been wondering, if an incredibly advanced nation such as Japan faces very serious issues with their nuclear power-plants, is it really the right choice? Can we really guarantee that nothing goes seriously wrong, ever? Cause that's the standard those plants…

It's worth noting that, even taking second-order effects into account, the total number of deaths from nuclear accidents is actually quite low compared to other methods of generating electricity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM Nuclear seems more dangerous for the same reason planes seem more dangerous than cars—when something goes wrong, it's a big news event.

One of the other comments was talking about the land-use impact of renewables. Nuclear exclusion zones are pretty bad from this perspective.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#273

Post by merb »

afterburner wrote: post #17
flaque wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that larger investment in nuclear won’t yield reduced costs, just as larger investments in solar did.

It seems like the largest feature of modern nuclear power is that it got a lot more expensive as we realized how much safety we truly needed to build into it. Whereas, without much prompting, solar got a LOT cheaper. When nuclear develops that significantly, we will all pay attention. Until then, build cheaper sources. Also consider when building nuclear, you are locking into technology from 10 years ago (when the pl…

> 50 years

most often it is way longer

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#274

Post by lisper »

epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

> all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear

Only because the cost of carbon emissions are externalized. If carbon were properly accounted for, nuclear would most likely be economically viable.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#275

Post by nicoburns »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #72
afterburner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're worried about birds? Better raze all buildings and kill all the cats. Wind turbine bird deaths are negligible. https://www.evwind.es/2020/10/01/the-realities-of-bird-and-b... You know you can set up solar panels on roofs, and in the desert, right?

Desert solar is certainly going to be part of the story, but I can’t imagine that we can feasibly power the whole country with desert solar alone, and I don’t think residential solar will be a significant contributor because you lose the efficiencies of scale afforded by acres and acres of collocated, homogeneous, ground-level panels for construction, maintenance, and operation. Consider even the overhead of dealing…

> I don’t think residential solar will be a significant contributor because you lose the efficiencies of scale afforded by acres and acres of collocated, homogeneous, ground-level panels for construction, maintenance, and operation.

But what you lost in scale you gain in:

- Lack of distribution costs. Roof-top solar (esp. when combined with storage) can be consumed at the point of generation.

- Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.

Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#276

Post by macspoofing »

brightball wrote: post #270
macspoofing wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Solar and win…

The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. We have a lot of parking lots out there. IMO the model used for parking at Lego Land looks like the ideal approach for solar expansion to me.

>The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots.

That's not enough. Rooftop solar panels on a single family home roof cannot provide adequate power for even that family (forget even trying to use appliances like washer/dryer/stove when on solar, much less charging your electric car). And if they cannot do that, then how the hell are they going to provide power to even moderate-density housing (e.g. a small apartment building), much less high-density buildings and housing (like office buildings), or heavy industry and transportation (from electric cars, to buses, to trains).

Solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. That will never change. So you will always have to have a large number of collectors. Our population will continue to go up for a few more decades. Our per capita energy use will also keep going up for a few more decades.

So you're going to have to build huge solar and wind farms and place them somewhere. You're going to have to mine necessary minerals to build those farms from somewhere. You're going to have to landfill the collectors somewhere.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#277

Post by Daho0n »

Daniel_sk wrote: post #20
rpiguyshy wrote: post #9

i just dont buy it. hypothetically, there is a nuclear power plant design that is perfectly safe in that it will never melt down. but there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste. as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. its just not an ideal situation. the government cant ev…

The issue with radioactive waste is more of a political and emotional problem than a real one. The amount of waste is rather small and it's not like it will irradiate you from a kilometre away :-). It can be stored in safe containers and buried in stable geological sites or even stored temporarily for many years in storage houses and maybe later re-used in types of reactors that will be able to recycle the spent fuel…

And yet we have places like the Marshall Islands where US nuclear waste is leaking at this very moment. If it is that easy to contain then why isn't happening?

The problem with nuclear is that people are too greedy to use it safely or want to weaponize it so lots and lots of regulation is needed. Nuclear energy will be fixed the day human greed and aggression are gone.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#278

Post by vasama »

Daho0n wrote: post #258
sofixa wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cost is the impediment to nuclear, not any sort of safety concerns That's not entirely true, and safety features and regulations are a major part of nuclear's cost. > That molten salt reactor will need to have a negative cost in order to compete with the cost of stored renewable energy Does stored renewable energy come for free? From what i recall, there's still no actual solution to that problem on a big scale.

>safety features and regulations are a major part of nuclear's cost. Which regulations -that aren't there for safety- are driving up cost of nuclear power? I can't find any. Are you saying we should cut down on safety to make nuclear able to compete?

Making a molten salt reactor safe might be much cheaper than a light water reactor.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#279

Post by ed25519FUUU »

dmix wrote: post #265
epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

How much of the cost thing like the $1B cooling solution because Diablo Canyon was an “old” design from the 70s. I’d imagine future investment doesn’t doesn’t mean building more Diablo style reactors. A big problem that promoting nuclear usually comes with plenty of arguments in the form of the problems of old reactors (like the Tokyo disaster one being built in the 1950s).

To be fair this is California, which can’t been been a mile of high speed rail for under $1B. It means absolutely nothing in terms of costs.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#280

Post by 93po »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #186
vlovich123 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is actually intentionally crippled through legislation under over-hyped concerns over dirty bombs accidents (for the right and left politically inclined respectively). Nuclear can be done safe, efficient, cheap and at-scale. All it requires is to allow for the secondary market of spent fuel like was originally started when nuclear first starting to get rolled out. The security concerns can be handled in other…

Nuclear loses to alternatives on a pure ROI basis. Even in places where political opposition or legislation is a total non issue (eg China) you see exactly the same bad math when it comes to the $. I feel like a broken record posting this in every thread about nuclear. There's too many people on this forum that have some sort of smug attitude about not being "scared" of nuclear power and don't bother to learn what's…

I feel like a broken record when people always focus on ROI and up front costs and completely ignore the millon+ people that did every year from fossil fuel usage
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