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Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

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Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#181

Post by dundarious »

koide wrote: post #119
dimitrios1 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my issue with the debate between Nuclear proponents and Renewable proponents (most of whom seem to be nuclear detractors): They usually compare what is possible in a future state with renewables to what is currently possible with Nuclear technology from decades ago. I want people to start imagining what innovation in Nuclear can look like again. If you want to compare current state to current state, then neit…

I think your assessment of what is currently possible with nuclear technology is somewhat skewed. The time from start to plan to put in production of an old technology nuclear plant is seven years on average (which honestly sounds optimistic). Whereas utility scale solar can be deployed in half the time (which will likely be reduced because most of that time is permits and other legal requirements.) All this is curre…

Precisely. There are numerous non-political, but rather purely technical and operational reasons, why any appreciable new nuclear builds are probably a decade plus away, even if significant resources are devoted to start right away.

The picture for most renewables as a fossil energy replacement is much rosier, even considering the generation profile problems that some renewables present.

I'd be happy for there to be some amount of investment in new nuclear builds, just to maybe prove me wrong, but right now it seems like a good thing nuclear is not much of a focus.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#182

Post by valarauko »

grogenaut wrote: post #136
Spooky23 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny when I read the Foundation novels, it seemed silly to me that people could lose track of technology and fall backwards. Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point!

its a bit of an over used trope in fiction to me that if you kill the one person inventing a thing you stop it. think t2 and the chip. most major discoveries i have heard of in important areas had multiple people running neck amd neck. when it comes to rebuilding a thing, i think whats important to wonder is would you even build it the same way? I remember seeing an article on ars about the engines for the Saturn 5.…

> That said roman concrete is a thing they've been chasing for a while

Roman concrete isn't some magical substance that we're hoping to replicate - we already know how it works - it just would really suck for the type of building projects we have now.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#183

Post by acidburnNSA »

voz_ wrote: post #175
acidburnNSA wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you understand the argument for commercial flight being safer per mile than most other forms of travel despite the potential catastrophe of a plane crash. The argument for nuclear is identical. The combustion of fossil fuels regularly kills 4.2 million people per year, year after year and counting. The combustion of renewable biofuel kills 3.8 million/year (WHO numbers [1]). Chernobyl directly killed between…

I am not sure this is a good argument, if only because the upper bound potential for damage is so much higher. > the combustion of fossil fuels regularly kills 4.2 million people per year, year after year and counting. The combustion of renewable biofuel kills 3.8 million/year (WHO numbers [1]). Your link is on air pollution, NOT fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are gross, dirty, and far-too-lobbied. However, even in your…

DISCLAIMER: I am a nuclear expert who got into nuclear to help fight climate change.

> if only because the upper bound potential for damage is so much higher.

Chernobyl was a nuclear excursion that blew the roof wide open and shot fuel out into the air. Air rushed in and ignited a nearly inextinguishable graphite fire that propelled the nuclear fuel high into the atmosphere. There was no containment structure around the core. And yet this killed 60+ people, caused up to 4000 early cancer deaths, and (yes) did cause a bunch of thyroid cancers. (Fortunately, thyroid cancers are usually treatable. Not saying they're ok, but not fatal like fossil + biofuel air pollution).

I would claim that Chernobyl is a reasonable example of a nearly-worst-case nuclear reactor accident. With modern reactors having containments, it's hard to postulate radiation releases of that magnitude. Case in point, Fukushima was 3 meltdowns and had much less radiation release and therefore health impact. I don't think saying nuclear reactor accidents are nearly unbounded wildly beyond Chernobyl is reasonable.

And again, fossil + biofuel kill a Chernobyl's worth of people every 7.5 hours...! The WHO numbers linked are due to the fossil fuel + biofuel. I'll link more detailed meta-analyses below.

Also, the area around Chernobyl is not really uninhabitable at all [1]

[1] https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...

As for thinking the UNSCEAR values on deaths are a sham, yeah I mean Greenpeace has been saying against all scientific consensus that the impacts are way higher for years. But the science does not support that. UNSCEAR is basically like the IPCC for nuclear.

I highly recommend listening e.g. to Gerry Thomas on this topic for details. [2]

[2] https://www.titansofnuclear.com/experts/gerrythomas

As for air pollution, see this [3] for more specific attribution to fossil fuel and biofuel.

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#184

Post by bluGill »

tablespoon wrote: post #115
Spooky23 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny when I read the Foundation novels, it seemed silly to me that people could lose track of technology and fall backwards. Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point!

> It’s funny when I read the Foundation novels, it seemed silly to me that people could lose track of technology and fall backwards. > Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point! And also wildly over-optimistic (as is typical for SF). In the books, I think it took something like 10,000 years to loose the technical knowledge. I bet we could do it in 100.

There are two forms of loss, loss of the theory, and loss of the practice. We will lose the practice - all the tribal knowledge that comes from doing it quickly. However so long as we can still read the physics, engineering and math text books we can recreate something similar. It will take a few years and we will make mistakes, but take a bunch of "smart people" and give them time and they could re-create anything from first principals.

It only took a few years for the Manhattan project to create nuclear bombs once physics advanced to the point where we realized such a bomb wouldn't need to be the size of an aircraft carrier. Only a few years after that (and a much smaller budget) to make a non-exploding power reactor. There is no reason society couldn't duplicate that if we wanted.

Now the tribal knowledge does help a lot, it you still have it you can take a lot of time off. However it isn't needed.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#185

Post by callumprentice »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #127
callumprentice wrote: post #74

My dad who passed away some years ago on my 50th birthday, worked on the design for the AGR for many, many years. Fond memories of him picking me up from school and excitedly telling me the interesting problems he had to solve that day on the walk home. A lovely way to start my day - thank you for sharing.

What sort of problems?

He worked on the steam turbine portion of the plant and the stories I remember involved clever ways of routing the incredible amount of pipework containing steam, coolant and who knows what else, to the right place and dealing with the extreme pressures.

I also remember him gleefully describing how robust the containment shell was and just like the piece in the article, being able to easily withstand a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into it. My young mind couldn't comprehend why anyone might do that and how utterly unlikely it was that someone might use an aircraft as a weapon.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#186

Post by formerly_proven »

pfdietz wrote: post #165
mlindner wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: But not low-magnetic field Tokamak. High magnetic field Tokamak are a lot smaller and could fit on a large spacecraft. They're room sized, not skyscraper sized.

ARC has a mass of 7,190 tonnes (not including generators or radiators). This is about the mass of three US WW2 destroyers. It's not room sized; the thing is something like 20m tall (once you include the support structure). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf A 190MW(e) fission reactor would be considerably smaller. There is really no use case for DT fusion in space, especially if they have to make their own tritium.

> in space

Pretty much all space-faring SciFi, including "hard scifi", is basically garbage that you can toss out the window as far as expectations go. Think things are hard to cool on earth? Space leaves you with radiative cooling only. The least efficient (space x time x cost x performance) type of cooling in the known universe. Internally-powered propulsion in spacecraft is never going to happen with thermodynamics around.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#187

Post by bluGill »

Joeri wrote: post #109
mlindner wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, but do people actually believe that? It sounds like a tactic by oil companies to sucker in gullible people in order to punt a problem down the road. It also acts as a great excuse by politicians to avoid having to deal with a problem. IMO, the reality is that these plants will never convert to anything other than natural gas and will eventually be shut down, still running on natural gas. Hydrogen is…

Well, any plan for green energy has major holes in it. If it was easy someone would have already done it. The EU is taking this very seriously however as part of their climate plans. The big problem with the hydrogen economy is not the conversion of the gas plants, it is having enough wind to generate the hydrogen in the first place. You need excess wind capacity to make hydrogen, and no private venture will invest i…

In Des Moines more than 80% of all power comes from renewable sources. Despite that my power costs are good. Iowa has a lot of land relative to people, but still there are a lot of power that other states are throwing away. (Texas as someone else mentioned is also doing well)

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#188

Post by voz_ »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #183
voz_ wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure this is a good argument, if only because the upper bound potential for damage is so much higher. > the combustion of fossil fuels regularly kills 4.2 million people per year, year after year and counting. The combustion of renewable biofuel kills 3.8 million/year (WHO numbers [1]). Your link is on air pollution, NOT fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are gross, dirty, and far-too-lobbied. However, even in your…

DISCLAIMER: I am a nuclear expert who got into nuclear to help fight climate change. > if only because the upper bound potential for damage is so much higher. Chernobyl was a nuclear excursion that blew the roof wide open and shot fuel out into the air. Air rushed in and ignited a nearly inextinguishable graphite fire that propelled the nuclear fuel high into the atmosphere. There was no containment structure around…

Thanks for the resources.

> I am a nuclear expert who got into nuclear to help fight climate change.

I think that is very noble. I am thinking of eventually moving my career to solar or wind for the same motivations.

Chernobyl was partially contained, it could have gone far, far worse. IIRC only 1 of 4 reactors exploded? I suppose hypotheticals are not extremely useful, but what is the hypothetical upper bound on the most catastrophic nuclear scenario?

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#189

Post by bluGill »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #124
Joeri wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long term vision is for those gas plants to be hydrogen-powered, with the hydrogen generated by the surplus of wind and solar during peak times. Pumped hydro for power storage is also something that will become viable. You lose a lot in conversion, but excess wind power is very cheap.

Pumped hydro has been viable for energy storage for decades and decades, running 70-80% efficiency. It's more efficient than most alternatives, to include compressed air, but it can't be dispatched quite as quickly. The real problem is the fact that environmentalists tend to hate dams, especially large hydro projects, so there's a major political battle on top of finding funding for these kinds of capital-intensive p…

Even if we could build dams with no worry about the environment, it wouldn't help. There are not many places left to build them, and a lot more would be needed. Sure use them where we have them, but they are not a something we can grow.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#190

Post by tomatotomato37 »

jfindley wrote: post #179
tda wrote: post #97

I bet the Fukushima backup power system would have fit this explanation perfectly: > in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel generator stations spaced around each corner of the plant -- each with two generators, any one of which is able to provide operating power to keep the reactor's safety systems working. Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami…

While these are real risks, it's worth pointing out two things: - This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away. - The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that. The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we…

I don't think a lot of people realize just how old the power plant actually was; it went online a year before Chernobyl even started construction, and it's own construction started when the Soviets we're still winning the space race.
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