351–360 of 415 posts
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What's to say that demand needs to be met with waste heat? Couldn't a plant tap off and sell some of the steam that would otherwise be sent to the turbines?
Yes, and that has been done in the past. It comes at the cost of lower power production, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Nuclear_Generating_Stati...
Lower electrical production, not lower power production.
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You need rare earths for wind power. They broadly come from hellscapes in the far reaches of Mongolia. [1] The reason they're primarily mined in China isn't, as you point out, their not existing anywhere else - it is due to the Chinese being willing to pay the extreme environmental cost of their refining. The second-most common type of panel, CdTe solar panels still contain cadmium, tellurium and sometimes lead - and…
Rare-earth magnets are often used in wind turbines, but very far from always. CdTe PV is made on glass. They are common mainly in the US, mainly because of import tariffs. But Cd and Te are valuable and easily extracted from panels, so, no, they will not end up in landfills. The Si ones may, but very highly-purified Si is also valuable. Thin-film cells likely to be used in future cells use very little material. So, y…
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I know nothing about nuclear physics; could you elaborate? How are the input and output different?
Uranium 235 can decay by splitting into two smaller nuclei and releasing some free neutrons. Frequently those smaller nuclei are themselves radioactive. Uranium has a very long half life, on the order of billions of years, so the natural rate of decay is very low. This makes it relatively safe, since there is not too much radiation produced per second. Many of the product nuclei that can be formed have a much shorter…
My only question about nuclear is why is it okay to bury the nuclear waste? I can understand that it might be fine to bury small amounts in specific stores but if countries slowly adopt nuclear energy at scale then over time won’t we be burying a lot of waste that, correct me if I’m wrong, has to be stored for thousands of years? I don’t understand how this can be sustainable long term. I also think it’s maybe arroga…
However. I still think humanity can do better.
If we put all the energy, resources and research that we are putting into nuclear into truly sustainable energy like wind, solar, wave and geothermal, which to my knowledge produce less or no byproducts, then that would be best.
It's unfortunate that the world can't take an aligned approach and build solar farms in deserts, wind farms at sea, wave energy on coastlines and then just export it all fairly to countries. I think I'm almost campaigning for energy as a global right and not for sale as a commodity.
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Yeah, I want a global solution to global warming There isn't one fix all. For example, Australia has loads of land perfect for solar, even in the winter. Meanwhile, much of Canada is too dark, and has too much night for solar in the winter. Some countries have loads of tidal power, and others are land locked -- no tides! We need loads of solutions, options, and costs to transition.
Most of the solution is solar and wind. Everyone knows this. It's why people commenting about nuclear will go out of their way to only mention one of them in any specific comment. It sometimes feels like the internet has one group of nuclear fans who have never heard of wind power and another group who have never heard of solar. It's tiring to deal with.
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I also thought we should've developed a nuclear waste industry here in South Australia. There was a 'citizen's jury' on the topic a while back but obviously public opinion swayed political action to rule it out. We have a lot of "unused" and stable land well away from population centres. I imagine transport from afar is an issue though.
Storing waste is too expensive to contemplate. Wherever it is put the high level waste (not much in quantity but...) is deadly and a silent killer for over a hundred thousand years. This is geologically significant time period, and we can make bets, but have no guarantee of any place on Earth being stable on those time scales. So it must be monitored. For a hundred thousand years That would be us making future genera…
This is really exciting. I wish we had nuclear power here in Australia. I know I might get downvoted for this comment. But with advancement in technology and large amount nuclear fuel (Uranium deposit) available, it's a great choice. 1. Vast swathes of uninhabited land can absorb some of the risks/fears associated with a nuclear accident. With technology like this, the risks are even lower. 2. It's lot cleaner than c…
> Vast swathes of uninhabited land ugh ffs : mabo was 30 yrs ago last month
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Why would I want to cover the entire desert with solar panels instead of having one neat little tube shaped steam box? You know three nuclear power plants (spanning 19 reactors) in Ontario provide electricity for 9 million people? How many solar panels and wind turbines would you need to put in their place? A solar PV facility must have an installed capacity of 3,300 MW and 5,400 MW to match a 1,000-MW nuclear facili…
But solar has the benefit that it doesn't need to be centralised, people can cover their own roofs and have a battery to be self sufficient and now you don't even need a grid.
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Until they need replacement components for any of this. Which they will need evry couple of years. Then they will need centralized infrastructure in form of manufacturing plants, roads, rail and finally (because it is imported from China most likely) ports. Every step producing greenhouse gasses or other pollution. Self sufficiency of this sort is largely a sub-urban myth. A comfortable, optimistic one, but a myth no…
Decades, IIRC, not years. Yes, total independence is unrealistic and will be until we have von Neumann universal constructors, but we are starting to get to the point where big footprint homes could reasonably be energy-independent for normal daily use.
Even 1 decade is optimistic life from current technology batteries that I am being sold from industrial battery sales channels.
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Decades, IIRC, not years. Yes, total independence is unrealistic and will be until we have von Neumann universal constructors, but we are starting to get to the point where big footprint homes could reasonably be energy-independent for normal daily use.
be careful claiming that solar PV systems last decades. Many recent builds have components that fail including the panels, junction boxes, the panel-to-panel connectors and the inverters themselves. Solar isn't as reliable as the solar industry would have you believe. Worst part, a single component failure often takes large sections of the system offline. With domestic systems, that's the entire system.