EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by effie » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 8:50 PM UTC

lispm wrote: post #247

random5634 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is in part the anti-nuclear folks don't want the problem to be solved. So you can build a skyscraper 100 feet tall in a high earthquake zone, but you can't build a container. The normal approach (france etc) is to recycle and then vitrify the leftovers and store in a container. You get much shorter half lives, much less waste. So even if it comes out the container, it's still "in" something. Of course, yo…

There are a lot of authoritarian and pro-nuclear countries which have not solved the problem. Actually some of them (Russia, ...) have the worst environmental track record when it comes to nuclear technology.

Russia has a lot of uninhabited space, so the contamination does not seem to be a big problem for them. Lots of countries behave this way, UK and US included.

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

#292

Post by tpmx » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 8:51 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #262

fulafel wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relationship of supply and demand in the grid is an equation, if they don't match you get blackouts or other funky things. When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount of power. Yeah,base load still exists as in the dictionary definition (floor of aggregate power supply and demand), but it ceases to be a fixed level that is a hard production quota.

> When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount of power. No, thats not really how it works out. Baseload should actually be called baseload demand. The idea of baseload demand, is that there is some minimum level of electricity, that will always be demanded, almost no matter how high prices go. Or, in other words, there is some about electricity demand i…

I think the situation in Texas recently illustrated this pretty well.

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

#293

Post by fulafel » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #262

fulafel wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relationship of supply and demand in the grid is an equation, if they don't match you get blackouts or other funky things. When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount of power. Yeah,base load still exists as in the dictionary definition (floor of aggregate power supply and demand), but it ceases to be a fixed level that is a hard production quota.

> When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount of power. No, thats not really how it works out. Baseload should actually be called baseload demand. The idea of baseload demand, is that there is some minimum level of electricity, that will always be demanded, almost no matter how high prices go. Or, in other words, there is some about electricity demand i…

Big problems maybe at first sight, but there are many ways of overcoming them. When automated price following behaviour is implemented in eg AC and heating and car charging systems, the spikes will be greatly lessened. Also, energy storage actors can sell into spikes, which will work to clip the spikes and encourage investment into energy storage.

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

#294

Post by tpmx » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

ducleonctor wrote: post #288

Nuclear power seems incredibly expensive and complicated, even more so than large coal power plants. The logistics alone are crazy. Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better used to solve rare edge cases li…

Meanwhile, in the real world...

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

#295

Post by _Microft » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

loeg wrote: post #85

brtkdotse wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas or biogas? Same gas but the first is fossil while the other is made from fermenting sewage and hence renewable

Either? The problem is that combusting it produces CO₂.

Not at all. Problem is that gas from fossil sources adds extra carbon to the short term carbon cycle while biogas does not (because the carbon fixated was already in the short term cycle).

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

#296

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

anonporridge wrote: post #275

Angostura wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree that we don't have a long term solution for storing nuclear waste. The thing is, we don't have a long term solution for storing CO2 either. The thing I like about nuclear waste is is it's obvious, its tangle and it sits around in sinister looking containers. As opposed to CO2.

The fact that this simple line of reasoning seems to be completely missing from the minds of anti nuclear activists is...perplexing.

At the same time it's not. Big scary looking symbols plastered over everything compared to just filling the air making it out of sight out of mind. Once that's achieved, the mass populace doesn't care. Try to build a facility with those scary symbols that are visible anytime one chooses to look, and people get all NIMBY very quickly.

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

#297

Post by acidburnNSA » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #260

fmajid wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big advantage is that thorium is a non-proliferating nuclear technology, which may explain why so little effort has been put into it.

You can still make bombs https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html#myth3

Yup. This myth is particularly pervasive. Less effort was put into thorium because it was inherently more expensive to get going and didn't offer sufficient advantages to motivate the additional expense.

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

#298

Post by ducleonctor » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #294

ducleonctor wrote: post #288

Nuclear power seems incredibly expensive and complicated, even more so than large coal power plants. The logistics alone are crazy. Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better used to solve rare edge cases li…

Meanwhile, in the real world...

...Germany gets its natural gas from mother Russia.

Which is more dirty, has a touch of corruption and allows mother Russia to tell the Germans how to behave. But it makes some politicians and companies in two countries happy and shows that large scale energy projects can work if there is a will.

So it's a start I guess.

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

#299

Post by ncmncm » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #229

Here we go again: 1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1]; 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost and safety issues; 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF…

These.

Furthermore:

1. Nuclear has always been the most expensive alternative, moreso now than ever before. Its advocates knew this at the time that they were calling it "too cheap to meter". Even continuing to operate an existing plant costs more than building out renewables and switching to those.

2. Nuclear construction projects invariably turn into massive pipelines for corruption and graft, siphoning $billions or tens of $billions from public budgets into well-connected private hands before ever delivering any power. Renewable projects (with the exception of larger dams) have not typically catered to corruption. "Small nuke" has never got traction, despite apparent efficiencies, specifically because it offers so little scope for long-term corruption. (E.g., the US government just granted a measly $10 million to one company to promote it.)

3. Nuclear construction takes so long that any supposed benefit comes far too late to do much good. The same money spent on renewables always starts delivering immediately, in much larger amounts, when it is most needed. The money saved on the much cheaper power can be spent immediately building out more, for even more benefit, compounding.

As an aside, Tokamak fusion will never, ever produce so much as one solitary erg of commercially competitive energy. The current ITER project is not projected to do anything until 2050 (although it will take hundreds of megawatts to fire up, for experiments), and then is not so much as planned to deliver practical power, ever, despite costing tens of $billions. The "practical" plant they imagine building, to turn on at end-of-century (after all of us reading this are dead!), would need to be an order of magnitude larger, and cost $trillions and decades without producing, all the while stealing capital from actually viable projects.

The only rational conclusion is that Tokamak fusion research is and was never intended to produce practical power. The whole program is, rather, purely a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists and contractors, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. Every cent spent on Tokamak fusion is stolen from research on alternatives that could, in principle, be practical.

(The one valuable output of Tokamak research is a generation of physicists now comfortable with plasma fluid-dynamics mathematics.)

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

#300

Post by godelski » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 9:02 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #229

Here we go again: 1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1]; 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost and safety issues; 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF…

> 1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes.

Do you have a source? There's plenty of larger fossil fuel catastrophes that just aren't well known because they are in third world countries, so who gives a fuck, right? [0] (note that this is 1700 square miles) I'm not sure this point if about environmental damage or human not being able to live there damage. If the former, I think climate change is a pretty apparent counter point. If the latter, well the size of that is largely political but you can think of it as an unexpected opening of a national forest. Sure, sucks for humans, but all the trees are great for climate (hell, killing humans is great for climate, but that's not popular).

> 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem.

Reprocessing isn't necessary. There's little reason to with our current industry, and even France's. Storage is easy. You place it on site. We have a few hundred years to figure out deep geological repositories (which I also advocate for plastics, heavy metals, and other non-degradable toxic substances). We just don't have enough and it isn't dangerous enough for this to be a problem. Nuclear waste is hundreds of thousands of times smaller than other energy sources (500,000x less than coal). You all act like this is a problem that only nuclear has. It isn't even close to being the biggest perpetrator. It is a good criticism, but if you are only applying this criticism to one product I'm not convinced it is a concern you actually have but rather you're just holding "enemies" to higher standards.

> 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems

This is a restatement of 2 unless you're talking about weapons, which my response would be that you clearly do not understand the difference between weapons and reactors. As a side note, understanding this difference is key to understanding the Iran Deal and why no one is concerned that they produced more enriched material than the deal allowed (i.e. it was a political gesture and could only be a political gesture).

> 4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue

And? It is stored on site. Energy production plants of any kind are a security issue.

> 5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.

See 4.

And congrats, you hit 5/10 of the common myths[1].

Now if you said that nuclear power plants were too expensive, we could have a real discussion and there would be differing opinions based on different criteria and hopeful/naive projections. But we can't even have that conversation if you aren't willing to just google the opposition's answers to your questions that have been continually asked for decades. I'm just reminded of this Futurama episode (which I just noticed makes a flat earth joke)[2]. We don't need more Dr. Banjos.

[0] https://medium.com/@renegadeinc/the-amazon-chernobyl-6309a19... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikneKQAeUp0

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-RUHhCzgxI