Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 818 posts

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

#451

Post by ncmncm »

trashtester wrote: post #315
layer8 wrote: 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…

Arguing that leaked radioactive contamination is less harmful than often assumed does not make habitually leaky nukes seem any more attractive, vs. alternatives that leak nothing hazardous at all, ever.

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

#452

Post by cycomanic »

cthor wrote: post #249
cycomanic wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. > Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremonge…

GP refers to "last decades" but that source is from 2011 with data ending at 2009. Do you have data for the last decade?

Why would we not look at the total subsidies over time? Here's the spending for Europe until 2007 [1], how much subsidies would have to be given to renewables to make up that difference? Here is some more data on hidden subsidies for later dates going to fossils and nuclear [2], but is not a comprehensive comparison of subsidies.

[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much... [2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/greenpeace...

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

#453

Post by zardo »

Manuel_D wrote: post #446
zardo wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly there are >1GWh thermal storage systems. I'm not sure if any are set up to generate electricity though.

The only deployed thermal storage systems are in solar thermal arrays. Those have costs that aren't not competitive with nuclear, and they're still subject to seasonal output variability due to weather and Earth's inclination.

And district heating systems. Where a 1-2GWh thermal accumulator will be used.

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

#454

Post by polote »

photochemsyn wrote: post #12

Funny article in that it doesn't discuss lifecycle costs. A side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power plant relative to those powered by wind/solar/storage is what I'd expect to see from a 'paper of record' like the NYTimes. Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of w…

The problem with storage is that it needs to be planned for the worst case. Imagine three weeks without sun nor wind, even if that happens only once every 5 years it should be planned. And the cost of having batteries that can produce energy during 3 weeks is unlikely to be cheaper than nuclear

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

#455

Post by forgetfulness »

goneri wrote: post #40
adrianN wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uranium ore distribution is also quite uneven. Fossil fuel distribution is also quite uneven.

Thorium is an abundant alternative to uranium, and the technology to use it has existed since the 1960s.

I'm a layman so I'm trusting the smarty sounding guy on Reddit and his elaborate arguments, but it seems like Thorium reactors, while delivering on the promise of not being able to physically explode, involve materials so nightmarish to work with that it's been impossible to create one that's safe to operate by nuclear worksers

https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9unimr/dutch_satiric...

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

#456

Post by dane-pgp »

pfdietz wrote: post #310
philwelch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible. Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear te…

Complains about renewables handwaving at scale, then suggests seawater uranium extraction and breeder reactors. They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.

> They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.

Don't worry, they're lobbying to lower those standards in order to be more cost-competitive with renewables.

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

#457

Post by ncmncm »

Bromeo wrote: post #241
losvedir wrote: post #166

One thing I don't understand is the uninhabitable zone around Chernobyl is not that big, and the U.S. has plenty of space. And electricity can be transmitted decently far, right? So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?

I don't disagree with your main point, but what's the point of making a nature preserve in an already uninhabited area? Since it's uninhabited right now the animals are probably doing just fine. Also, power plants (of any kind) need heavy machinery for construction as well as regular maintenance.

A nature preserve is there to keep somebody sweeping in anytime and eliminating the habitat. Which happens all the damn time.

Starbase, e.g.

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

#458

Post by Manuel_D »

zardo wrote: post #453
Manuel_D wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only deployed thermal storage systems are in solar thermal arrays. Those have costs that aren't not competitive with nuclear, and they're still subject to seasonal output variability due to weather and Earth's inclination.

And district heating systems. Where a 1-2GWh thermal accumulator will be used.

District heating systems distribute heat, usually scavenged from a power plant. They don't store heat really - they do in a pedantic sense in that heat is "stored" in the distribution pipelines, but not in the sense of a battery. And they don't transfer heat at gradients large enough to generate electricity effectively.

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

#459

Post by philipkglass »

wumpus wrote: post #427
paulmd wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scaling up capacity of the storage. There aren't that many sites that are geologically feasible for pumped storage (and it destroys a local ecosystem by flooding and draining it repeatedly) and batteries need rare earth metals (not actually that rare but environmentally toxic to produce). We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have…

> batteries need rare earth metals "Rare earths" are a column (edit: ha ha see below) in the periodic table, and are not used in batteries. Some types of electric motors use rare earths, others do not. Here's a primer: https://blog.ucsusa.org/josh-goldman/electric-vehicles-batte...

"Rare earths" are actually the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1], not one column of the periodic table. Good information otherwise!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanthanide#Etymology

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

#460

Post by ncmncm »

dboreham wrote: post #238
losvedir wrote: post #166

One thing I don't understand is the uninhabitable zone around Chernobyl is not that big, and the U.S. has plenty of space. And electricity can be transmitted decently far, right? So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?

This was the original (1040s, Fermi) idea, hence reactors in Idaho (after becoming alarmed that they had constructed a reactor in downtown Chicago). I think however there's a reason this isn't done now: it acknowledges that large reactors aren't safe (which they're not), therefore begs the question why build them at all. For the idea to become viable, climate change would need to become a much more immediate pressing…

Lots of reasons invite the question, why build them at all? There is no answer, because we have overwhelmingly more attractive alternatives.
Post reply on HN