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Nuclear energy is clean

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#61

Post by tedk-42 »

jmyeet wrote: post #26

Ok, so another pro-nuclear puff piece. Why do I say that? Because it talks about nuclear waste without ever mentioning the other kind: fuel processing waste. Nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. Enriching is simply upping the percentage of U-235 (the rest is mostly U-238). Civilian reactors tend to have relatively low enrichment rates. So-called weapons grade is enriched to a very high percentage and requires different…

How many years have France been safely operating their Nuclear plants? Germany too?

You speak of a Chernobyl exclusion zone, but I don't see anyone living where they've put up large scale solar farms or next to wind turbines.

You're right about humans not managing long term consequences well. From lead poisoning 40 years ago to 20 years from now when we have to deal with the waste of solar left behind (perhaps toxic waste if not dealt with right now).

We need nuclear now. No nonsense blockers. Build more plants and replace the coal, oil and gas base load stations we're running now to try slow the rate of carbon we're throwing into the sky.

And yes, we need more investment into solar and wind. It's a solution that is solved by multiple alternatives, not dummies getting behind one alternative and saying no to the rest.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#62

Post by mah4k4l »

tehsauce wrote: post #23
bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

Look at the numbers though. Fossil fuels kill many people every year, while nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical. The point of the article is to show that fears like the ones expressed above just aren’t supported by the data.

After Chernobyl you still today cannot eat fish from the lakes and rivers in 1000+ km radius from the site by Finnish recommendations. Because they are top predators and have enriched the gamma dose in themselves. How often could you eat human meat?

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#63

Post by timr »

TheDong wrote: post #31
bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure Of course, the Geneva Convention bans attacking dams, just like it bans attacking nuclear power plants. The pollution from burning coal has already killed more people than nuclear disasters conceivably could. If…

You should note that this is more than a theoretical concern. The world spent months fretting about Mosul dam in Iraq, not that many years ago:

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/12/11/mosul-dam-coll...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-probl...

Until we live in a world where we can micro-generate terawatts of power on a fully distributed, dynamic electrical grid -- if that's even possible -- the only practical technologies we have for satisfying our hunger for energy involve concentrated areas of high potential energy. Big energy, big target.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#64

Post by jbverschoor »

The problem with nuclear energy is that lekker don’t understand how it works.

It’s some magic invisible thing, radiation will kill everyone, and an accident will wipe away half the planet.

The public should be educated how reactors work, and what the risks are, and what the limits of those risks are.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#65

Post by cesarb »

anonporridge wrote: post #18
bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

This is one of the few good arguments against nuclear, especially large installations that produce a huge percentage of a region's power. Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily…

> An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.

You underestimate the cost and lead times of the big distribution transformers found in grid substations. As an example, a fire two years ago on a substation transformer in the state of Amapá (while another transformer was broken and awaiting maintenance, and IIRC the third transformer of the set was also damaged by the fire) led to most of that state being without power for AFAIK nearly three weeks, until a replacement sent from another substation could be installed (and as a consequence, that other substation ended up without a spare until it could receive weeks later a replacement transformer from yet another substation). Note that building a new transformer instead of shuffling them between the substations wasn't an option, because it would take too long.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#66

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

jmyeet wrote: post #26

Ok, so another pro-nuclear puff piece. Why do I say that? Because it talks about nuclear waste without ever mentioning the other kind: fuel processing waste. Nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. Enriching is simply upping the percentage of U-235 (the rest is mostly U-238). Civilian reactors tend to have relatively low enrichment rates. So-called weapons grade is enriched to a very high percentage and requires different…

Use HF6 as fuel for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#67

Post by [deleted] »

nimbius wrote: post #27

I really want to believe nuclear is as clean as the author says, but the biggest challenge is storing the waste for three hundred years. were talking small amounts, sure, but contamination of groundwater and surrounding soil isn't something we in the US have a stellar track record with. camp lejunes benzene contaminated drinking water happened in only a 29 year span, and the only real remedy is a class action lawsuit…

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#68

Post by Flocular »

lmm wrote: post #57
Flocular wrote: post #46

A good estimate to gauge the societal investment needed to generate electricity in a certain way, is to look at its total cost in dollar/MWh. Wikipedia has a nice graphic prepared for just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... (which ignores externalized costs like CO2 or nuclear waste) You can see in there that nuclear has triple the cost compared to solar. As we need to replace as mu…

And how does that compare to the business-as-usual shutdowns of solar (every night, cloudy days, winter as a whole) which unlike nuclear are highly correlated between separate plants? If storage is cheap enough then solar will be an important part of the mix. But unless you have the right geography for geothermal or hydro (which probably means flooding a bigger area than the chernobyl exclusion zone before you've eve…

That is just to show that nuclear isn't a magical always-on power source that some of the pro-nuclear folks make it out to be. Also: we can install twice the capacity in MW for solar and still have money left over to put into a smarter grid or storage compared to nuclear.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#69

Post by mah4k4l »

tehsauce wrote: post #55
lioeters wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical Nothing to see here. > Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011), the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).

All of those accidents combined killed less than 10% of the people that are killed by fossil fuel pollution every single year. Most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.

Has affected millions of peoples health already and whole ecosystems. And the consequences will cumulate from this thousands of years. Count that in your equation and get more informative numbers.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#70

Post by sph »

SapporoChris wrote: post #59
bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

You do have a relevant point. In time of war safety of many things cannot be guaranteed. However, I promise you, for the Ukrainians the bigger issue is not the reactor. It is a concern, but it is not the major concern.

While Russia has been irresponsible with how they dealt with Ukrainian nuclear reactors, I don't think they're that much of a problem in case of invasion as you suggest: if an attacker really wants your land, they'd prefer if it is not covered by nuclear fallout.
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