I'm not sure I want every country in the world to have the potential to build nuclear bombs...
Two different disciplines. The amount of refinement of the material needed for weapons is much much higher than for energy.
Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
41–50 of 182 posts
Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
#42Nuclear energy is sustainable only with technology we don't have yet. All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades. And the sea water plan relies on technology that has been shown to be theoretically possible but not yet shown to be remotely feasible. At the proposed scale of kilotons per year, this would require filtering hu…
I do not understand why this comment is getting votes. The doomer perspective alone should be disqualifying... While we can't completely prevent any climate change, we have already significantly bent the curve and our efforts now are important - 2 degrees warming vs. 4 degrees is incredibly material.
More on this: https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV
Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
#43In Europe everyone knows that. Even the craziest of our "greens" who insist on complete domestic decommissioning know it. The reason a few European countries are shutting their nuclear power plants down isn't because they think they are unsustainable, but because they fear they may be targeted and attacked. They currently view them as the combination of a sitting duck and a powder keg.
Plus, you know, storing the waste for thousands of years without a good place to do so. Payed for by the public.
Waste is not a problem, you bury it in a deep hole and don't mark it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
#44The calculations don't take into account growing energy usage. But anyone who understands exponential growth already knew that from looking at the title. EDIT: Title on the article is currently 'Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years'. I recall that that was also the HN title when I wrote this comment, but I could have got mixed up.
Energy consumption seems to be increasing linearly since the 40s not exponentially and the increase has been slowing down - to 1-2% increase per year. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
Yes, but prices have also been rising over that time. I expect that if prices had remained constant our usages would have gone up exponentially (equivalently, supply would have had to increase exponentially to keep prices constant). If we have low energy usage over the next 4 billion years, but only because the price keeps going up, then it has not 'last us 4 billion years'. The price going up is precisely what 'not lasting us' looks like!
Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
#45Nuclear energy is sustainable only with technology we don't have yet. All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades. And the sea water plan relies on technology that has been shown to be theoretically possible but not yet shown to be remotely feasible. At the proposed scale of kilotons per year, this would require filtering hu…
>"But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late."
Sadly I see no other viable alternative. Wind and Solar are seemingly clean but require a ton of resources, have a massive footprint, and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather.
>"All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades."
No risk of accidents is an impossible standard. I know this will sound snarky, but, if you agree with the idea that the danger of climate change is existential, affordability is a relatively minor concern in comparison. Especially when you consider that a big factor as to why Nuclear is so expensive today is because we don't build them anymore, outside of places like China and India, which already have nuclear weapons.
Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
#46"However, billion-year sustainability does require advances in seawater uranium extraction..." This seems like a HUGE understatement. The calculations for the billion-year sustainability basically assume we have extracted every single bit of uranium from seawater. We have demonstrated extracting uranium from seawater [0] using plastic fibers with a compound that attracts the uranium+oxygen ions. But this would basica…
> But this would basically require pumping all of the worlds oceans through these fibers and continually extracting. Yes, and? What’s the problem here? Billion years is a plenty of time to pump all ocean water through filters. The crucial fact here is that you only need to pump through and filter as much as you need, which is much less than millions of tons of total uranium in seawater.
With the proposed scale of kilotons of Uranium per year, this comes still to hundreds of billions of tons of seawater every year.
Now consider that only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of seawater is easily accessible.
There's a reason why we don't do this for gold. There is about 1/50th the amount of gold in the ocean, but it's also more than a thousand times more valuable, but it's nowhere near econimcal.
The scope of this product also dwarfs all proposed solutions for climate change.
Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
#471) there are no working thorium reactors 2) breeder reactors are hazardous 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this. The depressing truth is this shows that current uranium oxide reserves and nuclear tech could supply global energy needs for only 6 years.
1) Because we got rid of them for being annoying
2) Untrue. There are even breeder reactors with passive safety and very nice safety records, waylaid only by funding and partially by geopolitics (ok, coolant is expensive as hell, but that's because we don't mine enough bismuth)
3 & 4) Won't cover, not my area
The thing is, where are you picking up ridiculous 6 years amount? Because it sounds like very, very cherry-picked value.
Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
#48It's incredibly frusturating that this isn't part of the public discourse, where are the pro-nuclear candidates? Which parties are pro-nuclear?
It was for decades, there simply isn't anything new to discuss. We still have no solution a) where to put nuclear waste, and b) how to communicate to civilizations for the next 25000-50000 years what kind of waste that is. In Germany, the ongoing search for a permanent waste repository is going on for decades now. Funnily enough, this taxpayer's money is never calculated into the total cost of operating nuclear plant…
that was never really a problem worth worrying about on the timescale of our lifetime and has now been definitively solved anyway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
#49Right now, today, small village can take $30k from their budget and build small solar plant in their backyard in month or two, and then scale it up next year, and the next year. No multi-decade committees and multinational efforts needed. Nuclear will never be cheaper, solar is practically infinitely scalable. Time for nuclear was in the 80s, now that we have better options, we should pool all our resources into solar. We no longer have the time! We already have the silver bullet and it's solar.
Anything nuclear-related is ridiculously expensive, if all those wasted resources went to solar we would be carbon neutral by now.
Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
#50Nuclear energy is sustainable only with technology we don't have yet. All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades. And the sea water plan relies on technology that has been shown to be theoretically possible but not yet shown to be remotely feasible. At the proposed scale of kilotons per year, this would require filtering hu…
> All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades.
So, like storage for renewables?
Seems to me, we're not concerned on R&D budgets, so we should pursue all relevant methods of decarbonisation, of which nuclear is a very promising one.