Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable • Hacker News Board

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#91

Post by p_l » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

cedilla wrote: post #73

bshoemaker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think climate change is solvable, but we need solutions we can implement now. Proven solutions exist. Scaling up nuclear is not a solution. It is too slow and requires too much manpower. Nuclear had its chance, and it failed to deliver. It's a failed technology. It didn't work out, and it was never as cheap or as reliable as people wish it was.

The big economical killer for nuclear isn't renewables, but fossil fuels (specifically, gas turbines).

Take away gas turbines and other fossil sources, and without magic pie-in-the-sky, renewables leave you with rolling blackouts and broken grid.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#92

Post by cedilla » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #50

cedilla wrote: post #27

Nuclear 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.

We are concerned on R&D budgets. Costs matter because costs represents material and personnel that needs to be devoted. We are also tight on time. Nuclear reactors take at least a decade to build.

Oh, and while we have lots and lots of people and know-how in renewables, battery tech and transmission technology. We don't have that many people who can build reactors, due to the anti-nuclear trend of the last three decades. You can bemoan that, and maybe building up nuclear during that time would have been a solution to climate change, but that doesn't change the fact that even if we wanted to build hundreds of nukes today, we would lack the specialists.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#93

Post by AnthonyMouse » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

hannob wrote: post #39

blendergeek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) there are no working thorium reactors This will likely soon change. > 2) breeder reactors are hazardous France seems to use them safely. > 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist It will once we use breeder reactors. The reason seawater extraction doesn't exist is that it isn't economical. With breeder reactors, the calculus would change. > 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use en…

> This will likely soon change. It's almost like nuclear fusion, just with much smaller numbers. Thorium reactors are always just a few years away - since the late 1980s.

> It's almost like nuclear fusion, just with much smaller numbers.

It is kind of the same.

Scientists say that we can make fusion work in ten years given X amount of money. Government says, here's 5% of that amount, how long will it take then? Well, maybe two hundred years. Fifty years later people say, why no fusion?

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#94

Post by Robotbeat » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #60

Robotbeat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Untrue https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-hopes-play-leading-role-2203... 2) Not in any way that is irreducible. 3) wrong. https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/ura... “Oh, that’s just proof of concept.” Yes, and even 5 grams is enough to disprove your claim it doesn’t exist. Reality is we won’t need it for an extremely long time, so why would anyone do more than proof of concept? 4) still on-net e…

Your news article link appears to state that China hopes to build a thorium reactor. It doesn’t seem say one is up and running, does it, or did I miss something?

They’ve built one and plan to switch it on now, this month, and may have done so already. But the list of nuclear reactors that have used thorium as at least part of their fuel is surprisingly long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#List_of_tho...

I generally discount arguments that are in the form of: “we cannot commercialize this because it has not yet been commercialized.” But do thorium fueled reactors exist? Absolutely.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#95

Post by oceanplexian » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

jagermo wrote: post #21

daneel_w wrote: post #16

In 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.

Why do the same debunked arguments against nuclear come up? Even if we didn't reprocess the waste (Making the issue completely irrelevant) and had to store it, this is a solved problem. Primitive ancient civilizations were able to build structures that lasted thousands of years, I think we can handle burying some rocks in the desert in 2021.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#96

Post by bryanlarsen » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #45

cedilla wrote: post #27

Nuclear 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 accid…

> Wind and Solar are seemingly clean but require a ton of resources,

We pull 700 million tonnes of oil out of the ground every year. The resources required to build a clean energy infrastructure is significantly less than that.

> have a massive footprint,

Powering the US with solar requires a smaller footprint than footprint of parking lots in the US. Wind is even less because while a wind farm is massive, it doesn't prevent the land from being used for other things.

> and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather.

Hitting 99% renewables is straight forward. You get above 90% if each solar plant is overbuilt enough to handle a cloudy day and has enough batteries to handle a single day/night cycle. This isn't expensive, it only roughly doubles the cost of your plant.[1] Interconnect a bunch of those plants along with some wind will get you the next 9%. Then use a gas peaker for the last 1%.

1: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#97

Post by twofornone » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

Tepix wrote: post #69

dodobirdlord wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy is already sustainable with technology we have, breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing. They have been built since the 60s, some are still in operation, and more are under construction in India and China, where there is still an appetite for nuclear power.

We have this stuff on paper. Stuff tends not to work out in practise. It costs more, it's unreliable etc. If this were a solved problem why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?

>If this were a solved problem why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?

Because naysayers have had a dominant influence over nuclear policy since Chernobyl.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#98

Post by p_l » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

Tepix wrote: post #69

dodobirdlord wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy is already sustainable with technology we have, breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing. They have been built since the 60s, some are still in operation, and more are under construction in India and China, where there is still an appetite for nuclear power.

We have this stuff on paper. Stuff tends not to work out in practise. It costs more, it's unreliable etc. If this were a solved problem why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?

Because reprocessing is problematic politically, not technically. Yes, reprocessing involves some ridiculous chemistry, but we know how to deal with it. What we don't have is political will, especially when anti-nuclear activists are joined hand-in-hand with war mongers crying about nuclear weapons if anyone tries to go for plutonium economy (France and Japan are considerable way there).

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#99

Post by golemotron » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

People try to debate nuclear rationally, but I think there is a sharp divide in temperament in our culture. Some people want the solution to our energy woes to be perpetual austerity, lowering consumption and being eternally vigilant against anything that might produce more energy. The other temperament sees creating more energy as a good thing. It doesn't have the "closed world" assumption.

It's remarkable that the former temperament is very conservation oriented, and therefore conservative, but more a feature of the Left than the Right.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#100

Post by ben_w » Fri, Nov 12, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

cedilla wrote: post #27

Nuclear 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…

That’s overly pessimistic, I think.

While we would indeed need to process seawater at an enormous scale, that becomes necessary after roughly 24 times longer into the future than the first nuclear power plant is into the past, which is when the non-seawater fuel runs out. This is too far into the future to make realistic predictions about technology or industry.

As for it being too late to stop global warming: well yes, but because that ship sailed some time ago. As is said of various things and time periods, the best time to do it was a few decades ago, the second best time is today.

The bigger problem is the political viability, both internally and internationally. How does Iran ever use nuclear power when every reactor is destroyed by an Israel afraid that Iran wants the atom bomb?

But, instead of thinking of it as all or nothing, think of the reactors than can be built as storage or intercontinental power grid capacity that doesn’t need to be built, or at least that we don’t need on the same time frame.

Right now, solar is doing what nuclear promised and failed to deliver for costs; batteries, while cheap enough to make electric cars interesting, are still more expensive for shifting day production to night load than just using nuclear to start with, and my preference of a global power grid needs a few decades to build even with (unrealistic) zero political concerns. All of this can probably be helped with nuclear.