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EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

reuters.com

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Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#161

Post by laurent92 »

cbmuser wrote: post #93
random_kris wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but i can imagine as we scale the hall like that will soon be able to contain only 10 years worth of material. Then 1 year etc...

That single hall is for the _whole_ country for _decades_. Nuclear is the _only_ technology where the fuel and the waste for decades can be stored on-site. It's just extremely dense. The Russians have a single hall for all their waste plus the waste of other countries such as Bulgaria or Ukraine: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s The US even had a nuclear power plant with full fuel reprocessing on…

Just for everyone to have a picture, uranium doesn’t take much room because it is quite heavy: 19.1g/cm3, denser than lead (11.3) but slightly less than gold (19.3) and plutonium (19.8).

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#162

Post by why_Mr_Anderson »

logifail wrote: post #135
cbmuser wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000 years. Something that takes several hundred thousand years for decay isn't actually dangerous. Short half-life: High radioactivity. Long half-life: Low radioactivity. Furthermore, spent nuclear fuel can be recycled up to 95%: > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... > https…

> Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths [...] Question: in which sectors do we currently optimise for minimum deaths (above anything else)?

Uhm, healthcare?

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#163

Post by acidburnNSA »

rando57 wrote: post #69

I hope that in the future we will seriously consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power Compared to current methods of producing nuclear energy, thorium: - produces significantly more energy per ton - produces significantly less waste - the waste is significantly less dangerous (cools down in x00 years, instead of x0000 years)

Nuclear engineer here. I've spent lots of time fighting against persistent myths about thorium. All the things you mention are characteristics of breeder reactors, not just thorium breeders. Uranium-based breeder reactors can do these things as well.

Thorium has only one actual physical advantage, and that is that it can do breeding with slow neutrons rather than fast ones. This is a technicality and has lots of complications.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#164

Post by jay_kyburz »

fermienrico wrote: post #54
chmod775 wrote: post #15

There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a l…

Ridiculous Arm-chair Concept: - What if we make a 1 meter wall thick lead / steel container and seal the waste in and leave it? Surely nothing can break it, not even an earthquake. Just make a giant tennis court sized containers and dump stuff in there. We know how to build bridges, surely we can build large containers. Just want to learn, I am sure this is proposed and would love to know why its a stupid idea.

You can't open and close the box to put new stuff in, so you have to wait till you have enough to fill a big box. The stuff you are collecting waiting to have enough to fill the box needs managing anyhow.

The big boxes still need armed guards and a stable government so that it that they are not dismantled and used as weapons by future generations of extremists.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#165

Post by tsimionescu »

fulafel wrote: post #91
oblio wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy Germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors. Germany needs nuclear for base load. The current alternatives for base load are natural gas (meh, but maybe not horrible) and coal (horribly dirty, and Germany transitioned from nuclear to coal [!!!], making their energy mix dirtier than the French one, as France still uses a ton of nuclear power plants). Solar…

Base load is just a made up convention though closely related to traditional fixed rate prices, and may become increasingly fictional in the future as demand adapts to more variable supply and dynamic pricing.

So you believe the grid can be said to be working well with occasional dips to 0MWh? Or is some base load in fact an obvious necessity?

You may argue that the current value of the base load is artificially high, but there obviously is some fundamental base load given by the kinds of consumers you have.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#166

Post by pizzapill »

spideymans wrote: post #81
j-pb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000 years. And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands. Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities? East germany choose the salt mine closest to th…

>And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear…

We are talking about time frames that are many times longer than the existence of modern humans as a species. We have absolute zero clue what most humans did 200k years ago, we have only little knowledge what humans did 4000 years ago. How can you expect us to communicate with a world in eight hundred thousand years, or 1.6 million years? We don't even manage to get any of the nuclear waste out of our oceans we put there 40 years ago.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#167

Post by kergonath »

j-pb wrote: post #53
oblio wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy Germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors. Germany needs nuclear for base load. The current alternatives for base load are natural gas (meh, but maybe not horrible) and coal (horribly dirty, and Germany transitioned from nuclear to coal [!!!], making their energy mix dirtier than the French one, as France still uses a ton of nuclear power plants). Solar…

Yeah but wind and solar on a european power grid can. A nuclear power plant that's finished in 10 years is not gonna provide you with the baseload to stop climate change. That's only possible with expanding the existing tech we have.

But gas-fired power plants will?

We won’t stop climate change, we’re decades late. What we need is everything we ca have, which includes solar and wind where appropriate, but also nuclear. The fact that people pretending to care about climate change are pushing for gas is absurd.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#168

Post by rhodozelia »

cbmuser wrote: post #84
j-pb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000 years. And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands. Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities? East germany choose the salt mine closest to th…

> The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000 years. Something that takes several hundred thousand years for decay isn't actually dangerous. Short half-life: High radioactivity. Long half-life: Low radioactivity. Furthermore, spent nuclear fuel can be recycled up to 95%: > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... > https…

It is unfortunate you included the last paragraph in your comment as the rest of the comment seemed legitimate, but the issue in Texas had nothing to do with renewables, they were not scheduled to meet much of the system demand and the cause of the outage was numerous other plants not able to run due to the cold.

Including the last paragraph brings all the other points in to doubt, even though I otherwise agree with those points

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#169

Post by fulafel »

tpmx wrote: post #156
fulafel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you get the gist of my position (for cars too).

So when it gets really cold and there's little wind, we'll freeze to death? Gotcha.

People who decided to use directly grid electricity for heating but are not willing or able to pay for it during cold spells will find they have a summer house. Consumers can of course have electricity contracts that have fixed monthly prices as a derivative bought from electricity market actors. As the transition doesn't happen overnight, people and the social safety net will have time to cope and adapt.

In cold climates people have increasingly well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non grid electric heating. And can also shift power usage around the day because it takes a day or so for the house to cool uncomfortably.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#170

Post by Klinky »

cbmuser wrote: post #87
makomk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem with recycling spent nuclear fuel is that the required reprocessing is much worse in terms of safety than the nuclear power plants themselves. Lots of lovely, toxic, highly radioactive solutions which are practically iching to go prompt critical and ruin everyone's day. I think the only reprocessing program which managed not to be a safety train wreck is France's, and I half-suspect they might have ju…

The French have been doing it for decades already with not a single casualty: > https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploratio... It's not that they are doing the recycling in a cookie factory.

La Hague dumps radioactive waste liquids into the North Sea. Reactors currently cannot run 100% on MOX. Separation of Plutonium in the recycling process has proliferation concerns. Other countries have found building similar recycling plants challenging due to cost, with DoE estimating $50+ billion. La Hague was initially designed to extract Plutonium for weapons use, which likely justified its costs at the time.

The Marcoule site where MOX fuel is manufactured had an explosion in 2011, which did result in a fatality.

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