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Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

nytimes.com

351–360 of 818 posts

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#351
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mushrooms in Germany are still contaminated today from the Chernobyl fallout: https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

EVERYTHING around us is contaminated in some way or another. We are constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation with doses far in excess of the expose you will get from eating those mushrooms. Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg. In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there…

How radioactive are covid vaccines?

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables are far cheaper on the margins but not necessarily if you want them to provide all your power needs. Nuclear cost in South Korea, Japan, and India is generally under $3000/kW, according to this peer-reviewed study. See Figure 12: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... Now let's model overall grid costs, here: https://model.energy/ Pick a country and "fetch wind and solar." By defau…

That's overnight cost, not included in model.energy. You also have to add in the financing cost during construction. If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy, increase the NPP lifetime t…

Do the same and use German data, and nuclear optimizes to 100%. The US has especially abundant wind and solar.

I would very much like to see a similar model that includes a demand curve. Preferably, customizable demand curves, to allow for modeling of e.g. flatter curves due to electric vehicle charging at night.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#353
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not though; that's one of the reasons all of the grids aren't interconnected yet. "Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes" also applies here. The amount of energy you can deliver by transporting fuel rods by truck/train/ship is immense.

Transmission costs only capital. Opex for transmission is practically free.

And capital isn't free. With physical goods, there is already a number of existing roads, train tracks, and ports.

Capital costs is why Hawaii has traditionally imported oil versus having an undersea power connection to the continental US.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#354
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does not fit for consumption mean? Are there more ionizing radiation in a German mushroom or boar than in an average banana?

Yes, a banana has an effective radiation close to 0 because our bodies evolved to hold its level of potassium in homeostasis. Your body already has radioactive potassium in it. When you eat more potassium, the excess is excreted and the amount of radionuclides in your body stays the same. Caesium-137 on the other hand is drastically more radioactive and stays longer in the body.

Seems that caesium-137 is also excreted pretty quickly:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137

Still even though it's hard to find good numbers, and the average seems to be ~ banana / kg. I believe there's at least reports of mushrooms and boars with ~10-100 times the radiation of an average banana.

I don't think it's actually possible to show any health effects of that amount of radiation, even if ingested (and excreted) but it's more than the average banana.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#355

I just finished Bill Gates' "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster". Very good book, and it makes two points (among many others): - To reduce carbon in the air, getting clean electricity is key. If we can do that, we can more easily reduce emissions from other areas. - There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power.

Bill Gates, while wealthy and renowned for his tech contributions, has had some missteps in the climate energy space slowing down actual progress with his diversions (i.e. putting money/political will into new moon shots and saying that we don't have the technology to deal with this yet -- instead of deploying readily available technology which is ready).

> instead of deploying readily available technology

Well there's no opportunity for him to make inflated profits off a technology that he can't patent...

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmitting power over long distances has its own problems and infrastructure costs. It isn't trivial.

Building pipelines for oil and gas isn't trivial either but we managed to do it.

I don't see what that has to do with nuclear plants or solar farms. My original point was that complaining that uranium isn't evenly distributed is a red herring because you don't build power plants on top of the mines. Whereas you do have to build solar farms where the sunny days are plentiful.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#357
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVERYTHING around us is contaminated in some way or another. We are constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation with doses far in excess of the expose you will get from eating those mushrooms. Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg. In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there…

The website is official information from the German federal agency for radiation protection. While the risk now is low, and the article is actually giving a useful comparison to radiation exposure in airplane travel, you probably still wouldn’t want to eat those mushrooms or game every day, and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl. The overall point is that the impact was not re…

> you probably still wouldn’t want to eat those mushrooms or game every day

For the mushrooms, as a side order, even every day would be harmless. If you follow some stone age diet, eating only meat, then MAYBE eating those boars every day might cause a measurable increase in cancer risk. Probably still less than simply breathing the air in a city, though.

> and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl

In the first days and months after Chernobyl, there were real reasons to be somewhat careful. That was before the short-lived isotopes had decayed. Once the decays of those isotopes took over, and Cs-137 became the main source, the levels were pretty safe, even if they were double compared to today (the half-life of Cs137 is 30 years).

> The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.

And this is where my main objection is. The "impact" as counted in measurable increase in cancer risk, is nil.

By employing the ultra-conservative "linear no-threshold model" (LNT) of radiatino risk, then theoretically, over a very large population, you could calculate some number of expected cancer cases. But there is (last time I checked) no consensus that the LNT hypothesis matches data better than a null-hypothesis that doses under about 100mSv are harmless.

In any case, at that level, the risk for any given individual is so small, that it disappears next to any other risk you can imagine from pollutants or similar, so there is no reason to take such hypothetical risks into account for your personal behavior.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#358
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, order of magnitude error. > has built But enough? Global battery manufacturers have invested so much that they can take total battery capacity to more than 5,500 GWh by by 2030. US would need something like 3000 Gwh of energy storage to replace the base load. (within days, then few weeks). It would would be insane misuse of resources.

In 2021 US power consumption was 3.93 PWh. 5500 GWh is a bit over 12 hours of consumption. Not gonna cut it. And that's assuming 100% of the batteries are used for grid storage, and there is no demand growth in the next 8 years.

With Vogtle 3 & 4, the only nuclear plants coming online in the US, the construction costs are now projected to be $30 billion for 2.2 GW. We'd need ~1000 of these size plants to power the US. That's not going to cut it either.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#359
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are thermal batteries unproven? I thought they were at the "available for purchase from Siemens and GE" stage of development.

They exist in prototypes, I am not aware of any grid scale energy storage facilities using thermal batteries. Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities? Remember the US uses 8GWh of electricity per minute .

> Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities?

I don't know about that, but for comparison, the "world’s biggest battery storage system" opened last year in California[0] at 400MW / 1,600MWh.

[0] https://www.energy-storage.news/expansion-complete-at-worlds...

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons are political… just like in the United States. HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress in the perception of nuclear energy.

> HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress Wait, seriously? That miniseries was not perfect, but I thought it did a pretty good job of pointing out the issues with Chernobyl were largely political and not technical. (Sure the RBMK reactors were flawed, that is a technical issue. But the only reason that escalated into a disaster was due to gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard…

The Chernobyl miniseries greatly distorted the impact of the meltdown. They cited the "bridge of death" where everyone supposedly died. In reality there are zero known deaths among people who watched the meltdown from that overpass, and there's even interviews with people who were there. They cited a death estimate of 60,000 when reputable sources estimate 200-1,700 deaths.
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