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Nuclear energy is clean

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#81

Post by cesarb »

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.

Besides "synthetic inertia" on the PV inverters, there exist also synchronous condensers (basically a motor/generator spinning a heavy mass) which can already be found in many substations.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#82

Post by otikik »

entropicgravity wrote: post #43

Nuclear power if necessary but not necessarily nuclear power. Over the past decade the economic environment of nuclear power has entirely shifted due the huge drop in the cost of solar and wind. Not only is solar/wind cheap but because these can be built in a year or two, as opposed to decades for nuclear, governments accountants will much prefer them over nuclear. Nuclear will have some niche segments and I see a sm…

Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are only clean if their backup is clean, too. Otherwise they are an incomplete solution. Nuclear a better, greener backup.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#83

Post by GuB-42 »

vlunkr wrote: post #73
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?

Mostly from dust you breathe in, or contaminated water or food. And in one famous case, injected by a secret agent using an umbrella.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#84

Post by kova12 »

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…

Pretty much each statement in your post is incorrect. Nuclear plants produce tiny amount of waste, which we know what to deal with. Amount of fuel if you count thorium is enough for many millennia. And solar can not possibly replace other forms of energy production, not in a state it's in. I don't know why you are spewing misinformation, but you are clearly not going to solve climate crisis with that attitude

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#86

Post by toofy »

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.

i’m not at all anti-nuclear but i’m not sure what you mean by

> most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.

i also agree that fossil fuels kill a lot of people as well, only in slow-motion and we have some form of weird disconnect when something happens in slow-motion vs quick.

but again, nuclear accidents are not hyperbole nor are they hypothetical. again, i’m not anti-nuclear, i suspect we need a mix of strong decentralized renewables such as solar/wind and a filler of nuclear.

i’m no expert on nuclear accidents but my cynical take is that the building companies/orgs probably cut corners on safety in order to save money. and maybe that could be a area to improve safety—significantly overbuild on safety features. like i said tho, absolutely not an expert.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#87

Post by jseliger »

purerandomness wrote: post #77
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?

How do we communicate to civilisations in the present how bad the emissions from goal and gas plants are? https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh...

Because we appear to have no sense of proportion, or trade-offs.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#88

Post by anonporridge »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #49
anonporridge wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this line of thinking has defaulted us onto a path of drastically increased carbon in the atmosphere, with no signs of stopping, which is at best going to drastically change the world and take centuries to remove, and at worst could trigger a massive biosphere collapse that drives our species to extinction. The Earth has 150 MILLION km2 of land. We could literally have hundreds of reactors blow causing 1000 k…

Why do you think you have to decide between bad and worse? I think we should prioritize our planet over economy and lifestyle.

I don't. I think the generation before me misprioritized their fear and decided to block progress on nuclear fission, which implicitly supported the continued expansion of carbon fuel burning, to the detriment of future generations. It's an observation of historical fact, not a future decision.

> I think we should prioritize our planet over economy and lifestyle.

I think we should prioritize the continuance of civilization over the planet.

The planet and life on it will be perfectly fine after we're gone. It's been through drastically worse.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#89

Post by mah4k4l »

tehsauce wrote: post #71
mah4k4l wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Finland. In Finland. According to Finnish authorities. Countries with East Block histories like Poland tend to not care as much what the actual science of the stuff is. Nor does the Nuclear Is Clean - crowd is seems. "Everything radiates; just look at the bonfire, it's radiation". Yeah, right.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#90

Post by p_l »

entropicgravity wrote: post #43

Nuclear power if necessary but not necessarily nuclear power. Over the past decade the economic environment of nuclear power has entirely shifted due the huge drop in the cost of solar and wind. Not only is solar/wind cheap but because these can be built in a year or two, as opposed to decades for nuclear, governments accountants will much prefer them over nuclear. Nuclear will have some niche segments and I see a sm…

A big problem with solar and wind is that they aren't dispatchable. A 100 MWe nuclear power plant fitting in the space of small local power plant isn't equivalent of a 100MW solar or wind plant - for my local area, the equivalent solar/wind plant is about a combination of few Gigawatts of nameplate capacity of solar and wind plants (allowing for very optimistic storage tech, it gets "down" to 1180 MW solar + 410 MW wind + 840 MWh battery at 170MW output + 50MW hydrogen turbine backed by 10186 MWh stored hydrogen. It's also 1.5x the cost of plonking EPR-based NPP.)

Depending on smoothing from elsewhere is going to be also tricky - already considerable amounts of money are being paid out for curtailment because the grid can't take it.

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