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Nuclear energy is clean

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#141

Post by jmyeet »

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…

Apparently the author has never heard of Polonium-210, arguably the deadliest substance on Earth. what makes it so deadly is it has an extremely short half life (~138 days) and releases almost all of that energy as alpha particles.

How leathal? Roughly 6.8 trillionths of a gram [1].

Luckily Po-210 isn't a huge danger because of the short half life and it's really only produced by governments in very small quantities. But the point is that any alpha particle emitter ingested is potentially a massive health risk.

And what happens at an accident like Chernobyl? It scatters a ton of dust over a huge area that consists of many radioactive isotopes, some of which are just toxic by themselves (eg Caesium) but also some of them are alpha particle emitters. That dust gets into the food chain.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/palestinians-arafat-swiss-po...

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#142

Post by lnxg33k1 »

cesarb wrote: post #107
TheDong wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area. Besides, it's just water; many people are used to floods caused by…

Maybe look for the Vajont dam disaster, to see what could be

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#143

Post by jaredklewis »

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…

That’s an interesting, theoretical point. The containment structures around a nuclear plants are designed to withstand forces more powerful than even advanced artillery, so there’s really no chance a stray rocket breaks the structure. A concerted effort is a possibility, but it’s not a tactic we’ve ever see used so far and I think the strategic value of doing so is limited. If an adversary had a fully subterranean power grid, maybe an attack on a nuclear plant could make sense, but that’s hypothetical because most energy infrastructure around the world is not protected in anyway.

But another takeaway from the current conflict is how incredible nuclear is at shoring up energy security. A nuclear plant can easily keep 18 months of fuel onsite as required storage space is trivial. A 2 or 3 year strategic reserve of uranium would likewise be a trivial project.

Meanwhile other base load sources like coal need dozens of rail cars worth of coal every single day. Gas needs a pipeline or again daily shipments of LNG.

So now Russia has cut off the gas and energy costs in Europe are exploding and they are having to build out tons of new LNG infrastructure.

Russia can basically turn the heat off in Europe because they under invested in nuclear power.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#144

Post by _Algernon_ »

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…

In peace time CO2 emissions from nuclear are at the same order of magnitude as hydro. Similarly, the number of deaths per twh produced is also similar to hydro. Both are at least an order of magnitude lower than coal.

A hydro plant can be attacked in a war situation just as much as a nuclear plant, so I don't see how that should be weighted as highly as you seem to imply. In fact, I'd argue that energy dependence on nations such as Russia are a much higher risk to geopolitical stability than nuclear power.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#145

Post by Panzer04 »

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…

Batteries are more "inertia" than any rotational generator could ever hope to be. Inertia is only a concept because the grid has traditionally relied on rotational generators (which do have inertia). It's by no means necessary for the functioning of a power grid - isolated inverters don't need it, nor do portable rotational generators.

It's useful in traditional grids because we didn't have electronics that could more or less instantaneously respond to load changes - they had to rely on spinning generators instead.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#146

Post by jcfrei »

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?

Is this a serious concern? That there will be some kind of civilization in 10000 years that:

1) has lost all records of current generations

2) doesn't know about nuclear waste disposal sites and radioactivity

3) is still advanced enough to dig several hundred meters into hard rock

4) for no discernible reason digs up the entire waste disposal site and then what? contaminates their excavation crew?

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#147

Post by anonporridge »

aet wrote: post #121
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…

Few? Here is another: mining “Many Navajo people have died of kidney failure and cancer, conditions linked to uranium contamination. And new research from the CDC shows uranium in babies born now.” https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/4735472...

Good thing renewables don't depend on dangerous mining...

...oh wait, https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complica...

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#148

Post by mjhay »

aet wrote: post #121
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…

Few? Here is another: mining “Many Navajo people have died of kidney failure and cancer, conditions linked to uranium contamination. And new research from the CDC shows uranium in babies born now.” https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/4735472...

Solar panels and batteries require the damaging mining of all sorts of rare and/or nasty materials. This kills a lot of people, although predominantly in other countries nowadays. It's an argument that could be applied to nearly any mineral resource, and is more of an indictment of unsafe mining practices and capitalist exploitation. If we allowed practical research on breeder reactors, the need for uranium mining would nearly vanish.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#149

Post by tus666 »

mgfist wrote: post #136
cesarb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power has a paradox with respect to pollution: it's a highly dangerous form of pollution (heavy metals which are also radioactive), but in normal operation, it's completely contained (and nuclear power operators tend to be very paranoid about it; minor amounts of radiation which would be considered harmless everywhere else are treated as unacceptable outside the designated radioactive areas). So depending on…

Nuclear power pollution is the best kind: dense and contained. Imagine I tell you we could put 10% of the world's trash in a olympic sized swimming pool. Pretty appealing eh?

That's not pollution - that is waste.

Waste =/= pollution.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#150

Post by runarberg »

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…

I heard somewhere that the base load of power is an mostly an outdated concern at this point. As more homes get solar and offload their excess power back into the grid during the the daytime. Reducing the baseload to negative.

https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...

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