191–200 of 686 posts
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Magnetohydrodynamic generators were invented for coal plants 70 years or so ago but turbines are more efficient.
I thought they were ultimately limited by problems of corrosion at the electrodes? Helion's scheme to turn fusion heat into pushing E&M fields back through their magnet to generate electricity is pretty different from a standard MHD generator.
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Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine. With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.
They already tried this in Nevada and failed for political reasons [1]. Dumping nuclear waste in the desert may be a non issue to you (and to me as well), but to a lot of people - particularly people who actually live in Nevada - it is a very serious issue. The question of how to dispose of nuclear waste - in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed - remains an unsolved is…
> in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed
No, that is basically NIMBY. Of course some residents won't like nuclear waste buried underground, 100 miles from them in a place they'll never go and where no one lives. I don't know how to not sound callous about that.
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The microwave beam would be pretty wide by the time it reached the surface. The power levels wouldn’t make an effective weapon but would take up a sizable footprint for the collectors.
If it isn't many times stronger than sunlight, just build more solar panels. If it is many times stronger than sunlight, that's pretty dangerous!
But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1]) [1] https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors. Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) n…
6:08 here: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k
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It's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.
Budgets are decided by elected officials and elected officials are steered by their polling numbers. Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but…
... what?
Criticism 1: you'd need, what, like 100 nuclear plants planned and approved? If you started now, maybe in three years you'd get like ... 10 approved. five years maybe 20-30.
Criticism 2: nuclear is not price competitive with current wind/solar installations, and CERTAINLY won't be competitive even with efficiency improvements with wind/solar in 10-20 years when any plant actually leaves the boondoggle funding phase and goes online.
Criticism 3: what design of plant? LWR/PWR/huge dome/solid fuel rod/oh shit it melts down in a natural disaster? Yeah uh, no thanks. If nuclear had gotten its act together about ... let's say 30-40 years ago and designed a reactor that:
1) meltdown proof
2) consumes almost all its fuel
3) scalable / easily replaced
Then we might be able to do it. Problem is, the entire nuclear industry was invested in solid fuel rod designs, the military loved it for the weapons isotopes, the politicos blocked funding for LFTR and other designs, the solid fuel rod reprocessors were making bank, there was probably other shadow industries like waste handlers/transporters on the dole.
So... nuclear is a no go. Solar/wind for now, use natural gas and existing nuclear for levelling until storage and solar/wind+storage drop to levels unattainable by nuclear/fusion/naturalgas/geothermal/hydro. Synthfuels for aviation. Long haul shipping can probably be done with swappable batteries and/or synthfuels. ... maybe... hydrogen if it's not the current trojan horse for hydrogen-from-methane being pushed by the oil companies.
Maybe nuclear can be competitive when solar/wind even out, and battery/storage finishes its incredible scaling and tech development. Maybe.
But the path forward is wind/solar, and maybe synthfuels and green hydrogen if the green isn't "green" like clean coal was "clean" coal.
Our children should already curse us. The science was there, and my and ESPECIALLY the boomers picked SUVs, big houses, moving to florida, and lots of cheap crap shipped 5000 miles from overseas labor over dealing with problems.
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Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine. With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.
France, with much less uninhabited land, and vastly more nuclear power plants, somehow manages to place waste in a way that's acceptable for an EU country, and neighboring countries. (But of course "waste" is not really waste, it's fuel spent for a few per cent; a breeder reactor + reprocessing should burn it again and again and again.)
https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w...
Yes, short term they manage it.
When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.
But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1]) [1] https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors. Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) n…
How long will the fuel last? Sabine Hossenfelder references studies in which we have enough Uranium for 50 years max. 6:08 here: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k
Writeup explaining this with lots of actual scientific references at the bottom here:
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
People who say uranium will last 50 years either aren't aware of breeder reactors, which have been the long-term plan for nuclear fission since the 1940s, or they're misleading you. We found a lot more uranium than expected in the interim so they have been put off for a while. But we know they work and have built many.
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They already tried this in Nevada and failed for political reasons [1]. Dumping nuclear waste in the desert may be a non issue to you (and to me as well), but to a lot of people - particularly people who actually live in Nevada - it is a very serious issue. The question of how to dispose of nuclear waste - in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed - remains an unsolved is…
All you're saying here is, "people object to it." Or is there something more substantive? > in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed No, that is basically NIMBY. Of course some residents won't like nuclear waste buried underground, 100 miles from them in a place they'll never go and where no one lives. I don't know how to not sound callous about that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
France, with much less uninhabited land, and vastly more nuclear power plants, somehow manages to place waste in a way that's acceptable for an EU country, and neighboring countries. (But of course "waste" is not really waste, it's fuel spent for a few per cent; a breeder reactor + reprocessing should burn it again and again and again.)
>After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, has no long-term solution in place for high and intermediate spent fuel waste disposal. https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w... Yes, short term they manage it. When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.
If we could build the nuclear reactors now, keep the spent fuel (whether or not we're going to reuse it in breeder reactors) as safe as we know how, and solve the long-term problem later, then we'd have a much better chance of there being a later to worry about.
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> It's way easier. Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? > It has been working fine since the 1950s. Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... > Waste problem is solved The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? > net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution And we fight wars for peace too. > It's zero carbon Not if you coun…
Groan here we go again. > Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution. https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution > The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? I mentioned the solutions but didn't provide a link. here you go. https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html > And we fight wars for peace too. See the literature https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh050…
Yeah, we do with more pro-nuclear propaganda and outright falsehoods (again).
> Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution.
No, it doesn't. Here's the exact quote from your source:
> The combined effects of ambient air pollution and household air pollution is associated with 7 million premature deaths annually.
Not "die from" but "is associated with". What does that mean? "Associated with" here means "reduces the life expectancy", basically. That's a far cry from "dies from". The primary relationship with mortality seems to come from particulates. Some of these are natural (eg sand in deserts), some of it isn't (eg cooking fires). It also includes motor vehicle exhausts.
To give you a sense of the level of bullshit going on here, other conditions are getting attributed to air pollution [1]:
> They linked nine causes of death with the pollution: cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer and pneumonia.
One study estimates 100,000 Americans die every year from air pollution [2]. That just doesn't pass the smell test and shows you what's going on: it's attributing air pollution to certain medical conditions and then counting deaths from those conditions are air pollution deaths.
Exaggerations and outright lies do your cause a massive disservice.
Pro-nuclear propaganda doesn't address these issues:
1. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without significant government subsidies;
2. Nuclear power plant falsely reduce costs by externalizing significant costs such as the processing of fuel, the processing of fuel processing waste, maintenance, inspection (eg by the NRC), switching out fuel, processing nuclear fuel, the time-to-build or the failure modes of nuclear plants. Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later.
If these next-generation LWRs are so economical, why isn't someone building them at scale? The standard response is political opposition but what about China?
I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/20/us-air-p...
[2]: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-0...