231–240 of 632 posts
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That's only if you ignore the radioactivity in uranium mine tailings.
That was already in the environment to begin with.
Maybe the problem is the uranium mine tailings are safely off in some poor country, not in the US where the coal ash would be?
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I'm thinking proliferation as positive. Just think of countries recently in war had nuclear deterrent. They might not have been invaded in first place. Everyone having nuclear weapons would make world much more peaceful and safer place. That is unless we sanction all nations that have nuclear weapons and blockade them from international trade until they get rid of them and subject themselves to being open to inspecti…
> Everyone having nuclear weapons would make world much more peaceful and safer place. That's the happy path. The failure path with an unhinged dictator causing global destruction also gets much more likely.
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Nuclear won't solve the climate crisis as it's too slow to build.
Nothing will solve the climate crisis in the time frame it takes to build a nuclear reactor. If you start building now, you get part of the solution in the future.
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It is estimated that around 1/5 of people living around a coal ash lake has gotten cancer. Thankfully there are no such number for people living near nuclear plants, or around sites of nuclear waste disposal. The amount of people who has died to radiation thanks to coal vastly outnumber the amount of people who has died to nuclear waste. If we including mining, coal mining is a symbol of one of the most dangerous job…
Coal ash is nasty stuff, but that's very likely due to chemical toxicity (things like arsenic, especially in Appalachian coal), not radioactivity. BTW, your chance of dying from cancer in your lifetime is about 20%, so I'm not sure that the 1/5 figure you gave there means anything.
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> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. Any insight into the why?
They didn't lose their nuclear capability because they kept maintaining and building reactors instead of decommissioning them. US and to a degree most of Europe did not. China in particular plans to build ~250 new reactors over the next few years, most like new HTG reactors based on the pebble bed technology Germany sold to them when they abandoned their next-gen nuclear plans. Russia has reactor building capabilitie…
It would be more honest to cite the much smaller number that have actually broken ground. Nobody knows how many of those will be completed, or how many of those completed will be fueled or operated continuously, or where operated actually mainly generate power, as opposed to generating plutonium and tritium for weapons.
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Certainly this is cheaper than paying people to buy your electricity (as sometimes happens in California because of solar plants).
Since solar panels can go to zero output onto the grid instantly, this is just a matter of improper design (of the equipment, or of the regulatory regime.) In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed assuming it's running flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce that generation and the levelized cost increases. It's already very much higher than renewables; curtailing nuclear output would make that disc…
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If you have 7 of these and you find a flaw in its design you have to take down the power for the entire country. Something similar happened in France recently: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/saf...
If only we could have both types of energy source. Cover the gaps in solar/wind with nuclear, cover the gaps in nuclear with solar/wind. Sprinkle a small amount of pumped hydro and battery storage on top and what a world it could be.
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If those EVs are mainly charging at night, where does the extra peak load come from? Or is this just a case of not being able to shut off as much NG/Hydro generation at night (since nuclear can’t really be turned on and off at will)?
It's the incentivized/induced demand problem. Build out a new freeway, suddenly it's full of traffic. Same thing for power. If you make power cheap people find more ways to use it. This is still probably a good thing, but something to consider.
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The anti-nuclear crowd being successful might just be an alternate spin on the failure of the nuclear industry.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.