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

#301

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

ducleonctor wrote: post #298

tpmx wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, I'll bite:

> Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?

In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa. Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with a factor of 100-1000x.

Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...

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

#302

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

Angostura wrote: post #101

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…

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.

We don't have short term solutions for storing CO2 either.

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

#303

Post by yellowapple » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #75

winter_blue wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to nuclear waste is to use breeder reactors extensively. Breeder reactors both (1) substantially reduce the radioactivity of nuclear waste, and (2) allow you to get up to 100 times the energy out of the same quantity of initial nuclear fuel. A lot of the final breeder reactor products are non-transuranic general nuclear fission products (like iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, etc); and if a r…

We should move to breeder reactors. However, there is one unsolved problem: As the fuel is repeatedly refined/recycled, there is a step where it is trivially easy to skim some weapons grade material out of the process. I think this can be solved with a 100% automated (robotic) facility, that’s completely transparent to outside observers, and where no humans are allowed. Alternatively, pay people 10x market rate to no…

Or, we accept that people will occasionally have access to weapons-grade nuclear material and move on.

"But YellowApple!" I can already hear someone saying as I type this on a half-broken phone while sitting on a toilet, "That's a terrible idea!"

Yes, it is, but hear me out:

Let's suppose someone does skim nuclear material off the line. What's the likelihood of that nuclear material actually making it out of the facility? Geiger counters ain't a new invention; surely someone would notice if an employee is unexpectedly radioactive. If our thief opted to shield the material, we're talking a box that's probably too big to even carry, let alone sneak out in a pants pocket or something.

So by some magical miracle (or enough bribes, maybe) someone manages to snag a piece of nuclear material and escape. Now what? Nuclear weapons ain't exactly easy to build at home. Maybe sell it? Good luck advertising that: "FOR SALE: 1 gram of weapons-grade plutonium. Don't ask how I got it. NO FEDERAL AGENTS PLEASE! $42069 OBO 234-867-5309"

Aight, so let's say you somehow managed to figure out how to build a nuke (or you somehow managed to sell it to someone who does and not instead to an undercover cop). Now what?

- You could go be a terrorist, I guess. Good luck getting away with it, seeing as how that material you pilfered will almost certainly come up in a variance report and you're suddenly near the top of the suspect list.

- Strongarm some rival nation? If you're able to steal weapons-grade material, chances are they can, too. Congrats! You've rediscovered the art of mutually assured destruction!

- Let's say you don't give a damn about MAD and launch your nuke anyway. So now you're nuked back. A bunch of people die. That sucks. But! On the bright side, there's at least one less unhinged dictator in the world. Possibly two, if your rival was also a dictatorship. Do this enough times and we might end up with world peace.

All this being to say: yeah, sure, by some unlikely chain of events maybe there's a risk here, but considering the alternative right now can range from "millions of people displaced due to rising sea levels" to "billions of people dead due to global famine" to "humanity extinct because Earth is now Venus 2: Greenhouse Boogaloo", I'll take my chances, thanks.

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

#304

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

pizzapill wrote: post #166

spideymans wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

What are the odds of having large chunks of learned knowledge wiped out at this point? When the Romans did it, few could read/write and few people had access to the stored information of the day. That made it very easy to sequester knowledge. At this point in time, other than ELE type of events, can knowledge be kept away from all of humanity now? Sure, dictators can make it hard for the parts they control, but the rest of the world keeps on learning.

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

#305

Post by acidburnNSA » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 9:05 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…

Sustainability: Nuclear fission fuel on earth can last about 4 billion years using breeder reactors [1].

Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.

Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.

Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.

Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...

[2] https://thenextweb.com/science/2021/03/02/solar-panels-in-th...

[3] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

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

#306

Post by godelski » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #265

godelski wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dirty bombs aren't an issue. You might want to ask yourself why we've never seen one used, especially if you understand how easy it is to obtain the necessary materials. IIRC we've only caught a handful of devices (none exploded). Also we have to consider when it explodes, it just doesn't make enough radiation. It is pretty difficult to generate enough radiation that would actually cause an increase in cancer rates (…

To add onto this, widespread and cheap is way more effective at generating terror. The current trend in Kabul are bombs that get stuck onto vehicles by passing motorcyclists using magnets. It’s quite terrifying, since the ease essentially allows terrorists to enact a widespread campaign against civil service and civil society. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/world/asia/afghanistan-ma...

Exactly, terror is based on perpetuating the idea that anyone could be the victim of a terrorist attack. That they are simple and easy to do so the FBI/CIA has no chance of catching these "rogue" actors. Dirty bombs just don't fit into a typical terrorist's prerogative. Dirty bombs aren't cheap and can't be made by anyone. It takes a lot of time to collect the materials in a way that isn't immediately noticed.

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

#307

Post by michael1999 » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

jay_kyburz wrote: post #191

biren34 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to say, but the idea that "we don't need energy" is both false and dangerous. The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far, far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially with current living standards. The only reason we can support that many is because of a complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables distributio…

I would like to do some more reading about this, do you have any links? The wikipedia page is a little light on detail. I agree that we should have food security for everybody, and I agree that if we don't provide everyday people with power for heating and cooking they will just start burning things again which would create a bigger disaster. But when I look around me I see massive amounts of waste in every sector be…

The world population at the beginning of the 20th c (i.e. before the oil age) was ~1B, which was the highest in all of history. We are currently ~8B, on our way to 10-14 by the end of this century.

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

#308

Post by godelski » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

rpastuszak wrote: post #287

consp wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That coal waste is also radioactive. Natural, but still radioactive.

“Natural” as opposed to? :)

Plutonium is not a naturally occurring element. Plenty of stuff is man made.

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

#309

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #120

tpmx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The error bars make that graph unusable for this purpose.

That’s exactly the point I was trying to make - it isn’t clear that nuclear power has less C02 emissions than wind turbines. It’s also something that needs a very long view to calculate - nuclear waste needs storing and protecting and wind turbines aren’t being decommissioned all that much.

[deleted]

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

#310

Post by arichard123 » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #227

patall wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me irrational but storing small amounts of highly radio active material in many locations is, from my point of view, basically asking for a dirty bomb to happen at some point. It only needs an event like the end of the soviet union to happen in a single country on earth and any terrorist organization would be able to buy enough of it. I acknowledge that this may happen anyways with the current situation but your…

Dirty bombs aren't an issue. You might want to ask yourself why we've never seen one used, especially if you understand how easy it is to obtain the necessary materials. IIRC we've only caught a handful of devices (none exploded). Also we have to consider when it explodes, it just doesn't make enough radiation. It is pretty difficult to generate enough radiation that would actually cause an increase in cancer rates (…

Yes, the time that a dirty bomb is most dangerous is before it goes off