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An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

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Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#61

Post by masklinn »

grawprog wrote: post #40

One thing I never really see brought into the nuclear energy equation that's fairly environmentally bad is uranium mining. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/longstaff1/ >Uranium mining facilities produce tailings that generally are disposed of in near surface impoundments close to the mine. These tailings pose serious environmental and health risks in the form of Randon emission, windblown dust dispersal a…

> One thing I never really see brought into the nuclear energy equation that's fairly environmentally bad is uranium mining.

If you are going to make that argument, then you need to make the same about the materials and fuels involved in other electricity generation methods as well, and things get complicated rather quickly e.g. offshore turbines use a fair amount of neodymium and dysprosium, thin-film solar panels need tellurium, cadmium, and indium, … and many of these rare earths or elements are either often contaminated with radioactive elements (which end up in tailings) or are produced as part of (and ecologically indistinguishable from) other mining operations e.g. tellurium from copper and cadmium from zinc.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#62

Post by aksss »

hodgesrm wrote: post #34
dtagames wrote: post #32

For anyone interested in more depth, the full report linked in the article is worth looking at. In general, it's not been a good year for the industry. Uneconomical plants in operation, stalled and cancelled projects, criminal fraud and theft of public money, and the unsolved problem of how to decommission anything plague the business. If the real costs were addressed, it seems many more plants would have shut down b…

I guess I don't understand how nuclear power can run a submarine but can't be harnessed to provide power on land. Nuclear power seems to work pretty well in ships. It seems as if we're not framing the problem correctly.

Money is no object when making a military submarine that doesn’t have to surface to resupply batteries with diesel generators. Makes for a hard comparison to at-scale public utility construction.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#63

Post by 2trill2spill »

grawprog wrote: post #40

One thing I never really see brought into the nuclear energy equation that's fairly environmentally bad is uranium mining. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/longstaff1/ >Uranium mining facilities produce tailings that generally are disposed of in near surface impoundments close to the mine. These tailings pose serious environmental and health risks in the form of Randon emission, windblown dust dispersal a…

Uranium mining seems hell of a lot better than Copper/Nickel mining[1]. Not only is the scale of copper and nickel needed for wind and solar vastly greater than the amount of Uranium needed, but Copper/nickel mines have all the same issues with leaching heavy metals and arsenic, just on a larger scale. And wind turbines use a lot of copper[2], so I'm fine with looking into the costs of nuclear energy through uranium mining if we also calculate the costs of mining from Wind, Solar and grid storage.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage

[2]: https://copperalliance.org.uk/knowledge-base/education/educa...

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#64

Post by ruph123 »

wernercd wrote: post #14
CarelessExpert wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately you're more likely to just find confirmation bias here. The HN community (and the tech community in general) is predominantly pro-nuclear. Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change But that's not what happened. Given the…

> Truly viable When you ignore the glaring problems with renewables? Sure... but why pay attention to rare earth minerals needed, massive problems creating massive amounts of PV panels, recycling issues, etc We can't afford to let the burgeoning "savior" of our world continue on it's destructive path because the Religion of Renewables won't admit to the fact that it's Priests are doing bad things with children... To…

> recycling issues

You gotta love the whataboutism of the nuclear folks ranting about recycling issues of current renewable energy tech when nuclear leaves behind toxic material that has to be kept in a safe place for a long time surviving changes in government, potential revolutions, terrorist attacks, incompetence, greed, etc.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#65

Post by jillesvangurp »

akvadrako wrote: post #29
worik wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there is. Two sorts of grid storage batteries: Elon Must has made Lithium batteries work on grid scale. Flow batteries or fuel cells, are probably more economic. And then there is pumped hydro

Elon didn't make any grid-scale energy storage . The largest grid battery installation in the world can only supply power for a couple minutes – that's a buffer at most. Edit: removed first sentence.

It's hours, not minutes. Elon Musk ships MWH solutions conveniently packaged as in container form. The largest battery currently being planned is a 1.2GW setup in Australia. That's a big buffer.

Demand for solutions providing power for days simply does not exist currently. Hours is good enough. This business is about providing lots of power quickly.

You are right that they typically are only used for a few minutes to deal with peaks in demand. That's because they are only needed for that long and because you can turn them on and off pretty much instantly. You don't have that choice with traditional solutions like gas plants.

Which is why despite battery cost, this type of battery is very successful at largely removing the need for having peaker plants. It also seems to be very successful at getting rid of blackouts because there were never enough of those peaker plants to begin with in Australia. Another advantage is that you can put these batteries all over the place. Many small installations make up for a lot of aggregate capacity. You can put them in buildings even; and people do.

Musk is also building factories that are producing batteries by the GWH per year per factory and soon TWH per year. He's not alone of course and basically there are quite many other companies now planning their own little GWH production facilities. There are tens of billions being invested in that stuff in the next few years. There will be hundreds or thousands of these factories in a few decades churning out many TWH of storage annually.

That battery capacity is of course mostly intended for the transport sector and not for grid storage. But if you are worried about having enough storage capacity on the grid, there will be multiple TWH of batteries driving around on roads in most countries by the end of the decade. Basically 2M cars with 50KWH batteries == 1TWH. That's a lot of distributed and mobile storage. All we need to do is plug it in.

Of course there will be more optimal solutions as well. But it's capacity we'll have none the less.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#66

Post by aksss »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #10
stadia42 wrote: post #2

Note: I do not know if this argument against nuclear energy is valid. I'm submitting it in the hope that HN comments will help evaluate it.

Unfortunately you're more likely to just find confirmation bias here. The HN community (and the tech community in general) is predominantly pro-nuclear. Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change But that's not what happened. Given the…

At the 60-comment mark, I count 28 comments that are advocating nuclear or poking holes in assumptions about renewables. I’d say the debate is pretty equally represented in quantity if not quality.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#67

Post by toshk »

readflaggedcomm wrote: post #6

>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity. >The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastr…

To everyone being a proponent of this modern new nuclear plants you dream about I ask: would you want to live in a village where they would build a new nuclear plant next to it?

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#68

Post by paholg »

toshk wrote: post #67
readflaggedcomm wrote: post #6

>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity. >The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastr…

To everyone being a proponent of this modern new nuclear plants you dream about I ask: would you want to live in a village where they would build a new nuclear plant next to it?

Sure.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#70

Post by aksss »

toshk wrote: post #67
readflaggedcomm wrote: post #6

>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity. >The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastr…

To everyone being a proponent of this modern new nuclear plants you dream about I ask: would you want to live in a village where they would build a new nuclear plant next to it?

I would have no problem with building one outside our city. And frankly compared the land clearing one would need for solar/thermal or the blight of enormous windmills, I’d prefer it. What you may be really asking is whether people are comfortable with the risk of turning into the next Chernobyl. I feel that risk is quite low, especially for new builds.
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