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Nuclear energy is clean

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#71

Post by tehsauce »

mah4k4l wrote: post #62
tehsauce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fish are not safe to eat in the entirety of Poland? Haha this is news to me.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#72

Post by otikik »

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…

No one is saying that they don't have problems. What they are saying is that they have less problems than the alternatives.

In your example: when there's clouds and the wind doesn't blow, what happens? Currently we burn coal, gas and petrol. This means that in order to accept hydro and solar as the main source of energy, we have to take fossil fuels along, as a backup. Unless we find a different backup.

And nuclear is right there.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#73

Post by vlunkr »

GuB-42 wrote: post #50

> Alpha radiation is completely harmless and doesn’t even get through a sheet of paper. It is indeed harmless outside of your body, but it is devastating inside of your body. The reason is that outside of your body, it is blocked by your layer of dead skin, if it gets to it, your dead skin ends up pretty messed up as it absorbs all the energy of the alpha particle. But no big deal, it is dead, doesn't take part of yo…

How is it going to get inside your body?

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#74

Post by ekianjo »

Flankk wrote: post #37
anonporridge wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nuclear power plants create large amounts of waste that remain radioactive for thousands of years. In the United States, most nuclear waste is stored on site at the plant. This is because there is simply nowhere else to put it. Uranium is a natural material and will eventually run out, much like fossil fuels. In other words, cross nuclear off the list of sustainable energy. Solar energy would be the most obvious sust…

> Nuclear power plants create large amounts of waste that remain radioactive for thousands of years.

The article says otherwise. You can remove "large" from your sentence.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#75

Post by ekianjo »

kuhewa wrote: post #44
tehsauce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hypothetical, but the occurrence of future large scale conflict is overwhelmingly likely. This will remain a valid concern - not just accidents, but intentional attacks - until design of plants advances to be robust against strikes to failsafe without active management

> Hypothetical, but the occurrence of future large scale conflict is overwhelmingly likely.

If you are worrying about future large scale conflict then nuclear plants will be the least of your problems causing death and other things.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#76

Post by throw827474737 »

bob1029 wrote: post #51
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…

> Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happens On the surface this is very true. However, types of solar have caveats that do not manifest until you have a certain amount of utilization in the grid. Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia. This is the Newtonian concept that ensures instantaneous voltage stability separate from any active demand/generation management functions. The more…

> Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia. This is the Newtonian concept that ensures instantaneous voltage stability separate from any active demand/generation management functions.

Wait what, Newton's inertia was about physical objects, not voltage stability? You talking base vs peak demand or what?

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#77

Post by purerandomness »

Animats wrote: post #41

Waste disposal isn't that hard. The Onkalo nuclear waste repository in Finland pretty much has it covered. First, you find a hard-rock mountain where geology shows nothing much happening in the last few million years, and there's nothing worth mining. Worldwide, there are many mountain ranges like that. Then tunnel way down, but preferably above the water table. Drill holes in the tunnel floor. Put waste in suitable…

How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain?

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#78

Post by vlunkr »

Really interesting to see how much people fight nuclear power. We’ve been complaining about fossil fuels for decades, and now that the US seems to be seriously exploring a viable alternative you’re going to complain about it?

I get that there are issues and unknowns, but it’s better than the current death march, isn’t it?

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#79

Post by ekianjo »

lioeters wrote: post #35
tehsauce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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).

This is the same tiring argument - using plane crashes to say that flying is unsafe, because it makes headlines once a crash happens, while tens of thousands of people die every year on the roads. But hey, diffuse deaths, nobody cares about it.

So the anti-nuclear guys keeping point at the same list of 3-4 incidents time and time again, unable to recognize the ridiculousness and weakness of their argument - and the fact that their opposition to nuclear actively kills people year after year.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#80

Post by Flocular »

otikik wrote: post #72
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…

No one is saying that they don't have problems. What they are saying is that they have less problems than the alternatives. In your example: when there's clouds and the wind doesn't blow, what happens? Currently we burn coal, gas and petrol. This means that in order to accept hydro and solar as the main source of energy, we have to take fossil fuels along, as a backup. Unless we find a different backup. And nuclear i…

"when there's clouds and the wind doesn't blow, what happens?" Meteorologically speaking that won't happen over a large enough area like Europe or USA. When there's clouds there's always wind close by. It's also never cloudy over a whole continent (air has to come back down somewhere)
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