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Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

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Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I say footprint, I'm alluding to installations like the Taihang Solar Farm in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n731JjYSySY And, by footprint I mean the amount of space these panels occupy on the landscape. Putting solar farms in a desert is an attractive idea and way less impactful than covering hillsides in green and temperate areas. My understanding, though, is that the transmission of all that energy is…

Even if we created all our power from solar, it's negligible in land use compared to things like roads or agricultural land.

I don't think this is a meaningful comparison because they are not interchangeable and they exist independently of each other. The large footprint of farmland and roads doesn't make solar appealing in comparison, it just means that other facets of civilization are worse in terms of land use. To me, at least, just because something is way worse does not mean the other thing is acceptable because of it.

I also believe the amount of land we would need to convert to solar would be mostly be newly developed land. We probably wouldn't be converting already productive and utilized land.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#122
post #46
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Now consider that only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of seawater is easily accessible.

Not saying it’s an economically realistic idea, but on the topic of availability of seawater it seems like you’d just need to set up your pumping station in a location with a persistent oceanic current, filter upstream and discharge downstream, and you’d be set for thousands of years. The Straight of Gibraltar seems like a good candidate, since the large surface evaporation of the Mediterranean Sea and the comparatively small amount of water it receives from rivers means that there is a permanent current through the straight. (The Mediterranean Sea would evaporate away in about a thousand years without the Straight.)

This also makes me wonder if seawater uranium concentration in the Mediterranean Sea is much higher than elsewhere. The current has been in place bringing in seawater and evaporating off the water, leaving behind all non-evaporable minerals, for over 5 million years, and the Mediterranean Sea is much saltier than the ocean in general, suggesting that uranium concentration would also be substantially elevated.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#123

I find it amusing how easy we leave waste and decide for generations to come to deal with. Plutonium has a half-life of 24110 years – it will take about ten of them until it's gone. Just imagine the provision for 1 security guard's toilet paper for a quarter of a million of years. It's always pipe-dreams like 'somebody will eventually have a genius idea about it'.

Nuclear waste has appropriate and functional solutions on those time scales in deep geologic repositories. Finland is the leader here [1].

Compared with combustion waste from fossil and biofuel which kills ~8 million people every year and causes climate change, I have to say that the nuclear waste is dramatically better for the present and for the future.

[1] https://posiva.fi/

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#124
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that power will be uncontrollable, annoying on the grid (demand and supply must be in sync otherwise !FUN! happens), and costs of storage that make for fully renewable grid quickly eclipse costs of the more expensive nuclear options.

How would you build a fully nuclear grid without storage? Seems a really weird thing for nuclear enthusiasts to mention. It's like you're just passing on fossil fuel talking points without even reflecting on whether they make sense for nuclear.

You don't need large amounts of storage for nuclear-based power grid, only enough to provide frequency maintenance buffer while you change power output on the plant.

You need huge storage amounts for renewables just to make sure you don't have rolling blackouts (undersupply vs. nuclear's oversupply) or, what happens in reality, fossil fuel backup.

There is an equivalent of small village with fully renewable power grid (ok, maybe 99%, I think they had an oil generator or two). You have to deal with low limits of power you can draw, react in time to alerts to curtail your usage (or face disconnection), etc. etc. Forget about things like electric heating or charging BEVs, you have to worry if you can run the washing machine.

The typical "village invests $30k in renewables" hides a ton of externalities taken up elsewhere due to how random the introduced supply power is.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#125

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.

Also the plants are getting old and refurbishing them is extremely expensive.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#126
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to TFA, conventional nuclear power plants would exhaust the available uranium resources in 5.7 years if used to provide 100% of the world primary energy. The world could not possibly have followed Sweden and France even if it wanted to.

Citation?

First graphic.

That said, that assumes we only use USA-style LWR/PWRs that depend on natural U-235 to operate, I think, given that the numbers I've seen for reactors operating on unenriched uranium point to more like 50 years as super low-end estimate.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#127
To be sustainable, nuclear also needs to be sustainable economically. There's a cost problem with nuclear that often gets swept under the carpet by its proponents. But it's actually a big reason for its current lack of popularity.

Nuclear proponents instead love to emphasize how safe nuclear can be and how great of a safety track record it has. And with some caveats (e.g. the Fukushima mess was pretty bad) they are not wrong for modern nuclear reactor designs. However, nuclear is expensive and that combined with safety (which costs money to mitigate) is the real reason for the impopularity.

It always was expensive but historically, a lot of that was paid for out of tax payer money. Most new plants are still very expensive compared to almost everything else in the market. And they still involve a lot of taxpayer money.

Nuclear is not economically sustainable currently and those cost are either not payed (many countries don't have permanent waste storage solutions) or basically payed for out of tax money instead of revenue. If you add it all up it makes an already bad cost picture worse. Even without that accounted for it is easily the most expensive form of power. With all that accounted for, it only gets worse.

To be economically sustainable, it needs to become vastly cheaper and account for the full cost.

Will it always be that expensive? There are definitely ways to lower cost and there is of course a learning effect. But it seems we have a lot to learn. About an order of magnitude's worth of cost. And that would just be catching up to the status quo.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#128
post #75

If only the world would have followed Sweden and France [1] and largely de-carbonized their electrical grid by the 90s using primarily nuclear, we would be in a much better situation when it comes to global warming. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/... It's 30 years later and countries which push renewables heavily like Germany still have over 40% of their electricity produced from carb…

France has an ugly war in Mali because of their dependance on yellowcake AFAIK.

Found some articles claiming this but also others disputing it. France does not appear to get much Uranium from Mali.[1] Although I would not put it past them having an interest in future Uranium prospects.

[1] "France uses some 12,400 tonnes of uranium oxide concentrate (10,500 tonnes of U) per year for its electricity generation. Much of this comes from Areva in Canada (4500 tU/yr) and Niger (3200 tU/yr) together with other imports, principally from Australia, Kazakhstan and Russia, mostly under long-term contracts. Areva perceives the front end of the French fuel cycle as strategic, and invests accordingly." https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we created all our power from solar, it's negligible in land use compared to things like roads or agricultural land.

I don't think this is a meaningful comparison because they are not interchangeable and they exist independently of each other. The large footprint of farmland and roads doesn't make solar appealing in comparison, it just means that other facets of civilization are worse in terms of land use. To me, at least, just because something is way worse does not mean the other thing is acceptable because of it. I also believe…

It is a meaningful comparison. Agricultural and road use is huge. The solar installation you linked looks huge, but really, I could just as easily link an image of a uranium mine. Some of them are positively enormous - but that doesn't mean that land use for nuclear is.

A pessimistic scenario for Germany requires about 2.5% of the area for 100% renewable energy with today's technology. In a very densely populated country not exactly blessed with loads of sunshine hours. Taking into account the possibility of dual use (PV on buildings, wind turbines on farmland etc) we'll probably use about two times as much land for renewables than we use for cemeteries. It's very manageable.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#130
post #103
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-pi…

> 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) Reactors cooled with lead-bismuth eutectic have a somewhat nasty problem of polonium production. To the extent we'll see lead-cooled reactors I'm more hopeful about plain lead. It has a higher meltin…

The polonium production due to short half-life of the specific isotope was found to actually increase safety, as it made detection of leaks easier (root cause was fixed and isn't present in later models) and cleanup easier as well (minute amounts of polonium that were easy to spot and cleanup). Most importantly, it undergoes alpha decay, which makes shielding easy.
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