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Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

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Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#171

Post by belorn »

nullsmack wrote: post #168
belorn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have looked at the fossil fuel industry and released the waste into the air. Spread it out over a large enough area and people don't seem to mind as much, and living near such plant would possible be safer than living near a coal plant. The problem is that they stockpiled it, having the public pay the storage cost with taxes rather than with their health.

WTF No, this is how you kill a huge population with cancer at best and radiation sickness is still far more likely. What is wrong with you?

We should tell this to coal plants as that what they are doing right now. Coal waste product called coal ash release more radiation per energy produced than the waste product from nuclear reactors. People who live around coal plants have a higher risk of cancer. People die because of it.

Some coal power plants filter and collect their waste product. They then have to manage the waste. It either end up in landfills for toxic waste, bury it in the ground, or they dump it in the ocean. Hundred of tons of coal ash is created every year in the US alone.

Nuclear plants don't have the luxury to just dump it in the air, ocean, or bury it in the ground. The law require them to collect and store it, and so in contrast to fossil fuels it builds up and is visible. Nuclear plants create less total waste, and they don't contribute to climate change, and yet people are worried about nuclear waste while consuming enormous amount of fossil fuel energy.

The nuclear industry need better PR, while governments need to stop playing favorites. Force fossil fueled power plants to have the same requirements that we put on nuclear plants, and make both pay for waste management.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#172

Post by p_l »

ben_w wrote: post #169
p_l wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you would cause untold destruction to amazon rainforests, among other things. No, you can't just pave desert with panels and magically solve power generation without ugly environmental consequences, that doesn't work even in computer games.

> And you would cause untold destruction to amazon rainforests, among other things. Why would putting all the panels in a desert do that to a rainforest on a different continent? And how much of the Sahara do you think we’d need to cover in PV if for some strange reason we didn’t put any on rooftops, brownfield land, parking lots, car bodies, and (for most of the world) closer deserts? http://www.wolframalpha.com/inp…

Because, surprisingly, various ecosystems including Amazon rainforests are dependant on sand picked by wind from Sahara. Ecology can be weirder than you think, and having intercontinental dependencies is surprisingly common.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#173

Post by marak830 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #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 n…

Trying to make everything economic, us going to ruin our planet.

Why not have it as a government service?

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#174

Post by mro_name »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #167
mro_name wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

strictly spoken: no. I mentioned the time it is around and not decayed yet. I didn't stress radiation, did I? Plutonium is very toxic. No more after decay, I guess. But that takes time as mentioned.

So is lead, and it has a half-life of infinity. You were clearly using "long half-life" to imply "super bad!" when in actuality "long half-life" means "not very radioactive at all".

I talked about long existence of nuclear waste.

And yes, I consider plutonium super bad. And I consider keeping that safe longer than our species exists to date as ambitious.

I may err and plutonium may be a kinda decaying lead as you imply.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#175

Post by ben_w »

p_l wrote: post #172
ben_w wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And you would cause untold destruction to amazon rainforests, among other things. Why would putting all the panels in a desert do that to a rainforest on a different continent? And how much of the Sahara do you think we’d need to cover in PV if for some strange reason we didn’t put any on rooftops, brownfield land, parking lots, car bodies, and (for most of the world) closer deserts? http://www.wolframalpha.com/inp…

Because, surprisingly, various ecosystems including Amazon rainforests are dependant on sand picked by wind from Sahara. Ecology can be weirder than you think, and having intercontinental dependencies is surprisingly common.

Sensitive enough that 0.5% land use change would do that?

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#176

Post by ben_w »

fsflover wrote: post #71
bryanlarsen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 year problem? Climate change is an 8 year problem. That's the main reason that nuclear is infeasible, we can't do it in 8 years. We should have started building 100s of nuclear reactors 20 years ago. Doing it now is too late. Wind & solar + batteries can be built much quicker.

So you suggest to do nothing? Don't start with renewables, they aren't providing enough power and stability in the next 8 years.

If the literally exponential growth in PV from 1992-today lasts another 8 years, it will have a nameplate capacity of 12 TW.

Growth of storage is more of an open question, but not inconceivable, and even a partial improvement gives more time to do the rest.

(And the timescale sounds more like the timescale for actually taking this seriously than the timescale for fully solving it, though I definitely hope that isn’t just me listening to what I want to be true).

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#177

Post by ben_w »

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.

While I’m fine with making as much nuclear as is economical because it’s cheaper than batteries right now, we have had storage for renewables since at least the Hoover Dam (if not before), and electrification of cars alone (which we have to do anyway) is a larger scale of battery use than we need for meeting the needs of the electricity grid.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#178

Post by p_l »

ben_w wrote: post #175
p_l wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, surprisingly, various ecosystems including Amazon rainforests are dependant on sand picked by wind from Sahara. Ecology can be weirder than you think, and having intercontinental dependencies is surprisingly common.

Sensitive enough that 0.5% land use change would do that?

I don't remember the exact numbers from studies, but EU-funded research in that area suggested vastly higher numbers as part of removing fossil fuel dependency

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#179

Post by dodobirdlord »

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?

Reprocessing works fine in practice, as others have mentioned, it’s uncommon because it’s politically unpopular. Partially because everything related to nuclear anything is politically unpopular, partially because having high-purity plutonium lying around poses nuclear weapon proliferation risks. Though this can be avoided by breeding and reacting in situ.

> why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?

You may be inclined to wonder why there is so much nuclear waste at all. After all, we could just melt it, dilute it into a slag with a bunch of silicon, cart it off to a boat and dump it into a deep ocean trench if we wanted to be safely rid of it. But we don’t want to be rid of it. It’s extremely expensive to produce and extremely valuable, and any permanent solution for storing nuclear waste needs to be reversible in case we ever want it back for reprocessing.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#180

Post by throwaway5752 »

ortusdux wrote: post #143
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…

Re: #3 & 4, I've toured that lab and seen that experiment in person, and it is extremely promising. Their original tests we able to produce yellowcake uranium at roughly 2x market rate, which is amazing for a domestic source. They are now working on scaling and unique applications to bring the price even lower. I believe that they are looking at post filtering desalination brine. The process extracts many heavy metal…

The Stanford group? That's great news on the production prices. I still doubt the extraction rate assumptions in the articles, but I think renewables plus scaled down nuclear will be the path forward.
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