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Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

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Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#641

Seems like everybody is jumping on the "environmentalists that don't like nuclear power do it for ideological reasons and are paid by the oil lobby" resentment bandwagon. While I think it is a fair point and while I do think it's a stupid mistake to close nuclear plants, there are also issues that I rarely see addressed probably because they drown under all the rest : 1. Nuclear plants are very expensive and some pro…

To your fifth point, nuclear reactor containment vessels can easily withstand a plane crashing into them [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/F4CX-9lkRMQ

Interesting thanks!

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things are expensive - more expensive - but we should do them anyways because they're the right thing to do. Generally I refer to the 'nuclear fairy' as the government, whose job it is in my opinion, to make sure we do the right thing even when the market isn't interested.

You are engaging in the egregious fallacy of "if the government pays for it, it's free". That's true at the individual level. It's not true at the level of the whole society. And it's that latter level that matters when asking if nuclear power makes sense. It's hard to see how wasting resources and, all else being equal, doing something the much more expensive way would be "the right thing to do". If nuclear is too e…

> You are engaging in the egregious fallacy of "if the government pays for it, it's free".

No, I'm not.

A role of government in my opinion is to facilitate providing services and creating infrastructure in the public interest which might not make market economic sense at the time we need it - if it is a better outcome for the citizenry. You're welcome to disagree but there's no fallacy there. I never said it was free, I said it was more expensive - but the government should do it anyways because it will make us better off. Like the post office and the EPA.

There's a reason in going to the moon, JFK never said that “we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not just because they are easy, but because they are the cheapest thing we can possibly do, and if it starts to look like it's cheaper or easier to be sitting on the couch then too bad so sad, to the couch we shall return!"

He said it was "because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

> If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.

Right no. I don't believe in that. Again, nuclear is renewable, this much is basically indisputable. I believe that a better solution can be government funded in line with the charter of any world government, be it a western democracy or the PRC. I do not believe market viability is the be all and end all in this here world. I believe that attitude would have left us living as hunter-gatherers. I do not believe the cheapest solution is the only solution we should advocate for or pursue, period.

We deserve better and should demand better than your position.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't seawater extraction scale? There's 4 billion tons of uranium in the sea (a 60,000 year supply at current usage levels), and 100 trillion tons of uranium below that from which it's replenished as it is extracted. [1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514

Supplying a single 1 GW(e) burner reactor with seawater uranium would require a 170 square kilometer absorber field on the continental shelf. That's much worse power/area than solar, and just slightly higher than the power/area of an offshore wind field. Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.

Sir. There's a practically unlimited quantity of uranium available to meet our energy needs now and for as long as humans wander this rock. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best. A huge reason breeder reactors aren't used right now is that there's plenty of land-based uranium already and fuel is not a concern. So much so that stretching it with breeders doesn't really matter, and as a percentage of the cost of generated electricity the uranium input barely registers. By the time we need to dip into the renewable water-based sources, we'll long since have been carbon-free. It'll scale just fine. Stop worrying about problems that won't matter for 10-100,000 years. We've gotta clear the century first.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can encapsulate the pellets to the point that they can survive getting blown out of orbit, catching fire and raining down over the human population without causing any harm - you can encapsulate them and throw them into Yucca Mountain and save the whole exiting earth step.

Except no, those are not the same thing. Stuff in the repository, for example, is exposed to a much higher cumulative radiation dose, which causes huge and unacceptable changes in many materials.

I'm not sure that's relevant to the broader argument I am making. Don't blast waste into space. It carries with it dramatically higher costs - and drastically higher risks. It's completely untenable according to every study and paper on the matter.

Again, selecting a geographic area away from humans and providing sufficient demarcation is dramatically safer than putting it into a rocket and flying it up into orbit over humans. If you disagree, cite a source on its feasibility - and one on the lack of feasibility of deep geological sequestration. Let's not shoot from the hip on this one. I know I haven't found any.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, any bad design is subject to failure. Aircraft are subject to catastrophic failure too, so we iterate and improve until they're super safe.

Fast reactor inherently have more fissionable material in a smaller volume, and don't have a moderator that can either keep things separated or remove itself in an accident to kill the chain reaction. If a supercriticality on prompt neutrons alone occurs in a fast reactor the neutron population will increase orders of magnitude faster than in a thermal reactor, because the neutrons are moving so much faster. Edward T…

That's not the argument I was making. I said anything of sufficient scale carries significant risk, and we can in time reduce that risk to acceptable levels via engineering practices and principles. As with airplanes, which are metal tubes full of humans we load up with kerosene and send into the atmosphere. A bad plane will crash, a bad reactor will melt down. We can overcome the risks to reap the rewards. That's like our whole thing, as humans.

Chernobyl happened for a very specific reason - you know, the late-night tests and the positive void coefficient. Do you think we haven't learned? Please cite sources. The thing is, we have learned. That's why reactors are so expensive. You're double-dipping by citing the risks and the costs. It's really one or the other if you're not being disingenuous.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a pain how certain groups are so hung up on specific energy sources. German greens will never consider nuclear energy, Albertans will never consider anything that didn't come out of the ground either as oil or oil derived. It's like belonging to a sports team, it's silly. I used to be very much against nuclear energy because of the unsolved issue around dealing with it's waste. Two decades later after learn…

So, what changed in regards to dealing with its waste in the two decades? Or do you simply not care enough anymore?

Waste was never the big problem with fission, nor is it the blocking issue now. The world has gravitated toward dry cask storage of spent fuel, which is both simple, sensible, and cheap. It only contributes $0.001/kWh toward the cost of power from fission reactors, and precludes no future options to dealing with the spent fuel.

What has blocked fission is one thing: cost. For a while, fission advocates could stand pat, knowing that eventually fossil fuels would have to be moved away from, to fission, regardless of how expensive fission was. But now renewables have undercut fission, so that (somewhat lazy) expectation, that fission was almost entitled to be the post-fossil energy source, is no longer valid.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The population exposure from radiation from Fukushima will likely cause some hundreds of cancers. These will not be statistically detectable, but that doesn't mean they won't exist and that policy cannot take their plausible existence into account.

Any sources for this estimation? I've read nothing even remotely close to that prediction. At its peak, people in Fukushima city were only receiving ~0.06 mSv/day of radiation. This only lasted a couple of days. The vast majority of people didn't even face that since they were evacuated. In contrast, a transatlantic flight results in about 0.1 mSv of radiation. Someone getting a single abdomen x-ray would get over 0.…

It's a ballpark from 2 million people exposed to an extra dose of about 1 mSv.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supplying a single 1 GW(e) burner reactor with seawater uranium would require a 170 square kilometer absorber field on the continental shelf. That's much worse power/area than solar, and just slightly higher than the power/area of an offshore wind field. Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.

Sir. There's a practically unlimited quantity of uranium available to meet our energy needs now and for as long as humans wander this rock. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best. A huge reason breeder reactors aren't used right now is that there's plenty of land-based uranium already and fuel is not a concern. So much so that stretching it with breeders doesn't really matter, and as a percentage of the cost of g…

There is a pratically unlimited quantity if cost is no object. But for cost to be no object, breeder reactors are needed. For burner reactors, fuel cost will begin to be seriously affected rather quickly if we try to supply a 100% nuclear world economy with only terrestrial U sources. That economy would go through in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year to supply the current world average primary energy demand of 18 TW (about 6000 3 MW(th) reactors.) This could exhaust known terrestrial uranium resources (not proven reserves) in less than a decade.

Breeders, as I said, would greatly extend the terrestrial U resource, both by getting 100x as much energy per unit of natural uranium, and by allowing resources 100x as dilute to be economically exploited.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast reactor inherently have more fissionable material in a smaller volume, and don't have a moderator that can either keep things separated or remove itself in an accident to kill the chain reaction. If a supercriticality on prompt neutrons alone occurs in a fast reactor the neutron population will increase orders of magnitude faster than in a thermal reactor, because the neutrons are moving so much faster. Edward T…

That's not the argument I was making. I said anything of sufficient scale carries significant risk, and we can in time reduce that risk to acceptable levels via engineering practices and principles. As with airplanes, which are metal tubes full of humans we load up with kerosene and send into the atmosphere. A bad plane will crash, a bad reactor will melt down. We can overcome the risks to reap the rewards. That's li…

It's not the argument you were making, but it's a point your argument is compelled to address. Yes, any system of sufficient scale carries risks. In the case of breeder reactors, one of those risks is the possibility of something approaching an actual nuclear explosion, with fast neutron physics similar to what happens in actual fission bombs, not pitiful low yield moderated explosions as happened in Chernobyl.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except no, those are not the same thing. Stuff in the repository, for example, is exposed to a much higher cumulative radiation dose, which causes huge and unacceptable changes in many materials.

I'm not sure that's relevant to the broader argument I am making. Don't blast waste into space. It carries with it dramatically higher costs - and drastically higher risks. It's completely untenable according to every study and paper on the matter. Again, selecting a geographic area away from humans and providing sufficient demarcation is dramatically safer than putting it into a rocket and flying it up into orbit ov…

It's untenable with current launch vehicles. Do you think current launch vehicles are the sine qua non of launcher technology, for centuries into the future? We don't have to shoot stuff into space right this moment.
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