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Nuclear energy is clean

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#151

Post by credit_guy »

epistasis wrote: post #119
credit_guy wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the real reason nuclear power did not succeed in the US (I can't speak of other countries). It was opposed by the Democrats, and the Republicans, although some in favor of it, decided they don't want to spend whatever political capital they had on this. Now both Democrats and Republicans are pro nuclear power. You may not like it, but nuclear power is having a comeback.

The last time to start nuclear to address climate change was the mid-2000s. And we did start four reactors, with many more planned! However they are all construction failures, and the two at Summer were actually even abandoned half completed, it was so bad. And executives our going to jail for their lies during the construction process. That's what I mean when I say nobody knows how to build it. We will likely never…

> and we have other options that we didn't have 20 years ago.

We do, but those options are not enough. If they were, the Democrats in Washington would not have turned pro-nuclear.

They saw the numbers. You can store electricity from day to night, but not from Summer to Winter. Months-long electricity storage will never make economic sense (or at least not in the next 30 years).

Nuclear reactor construction is currently a decades-long affair. Can we make it shorter?

Here's a little historical tidbit: in WW2, when the Liberty ships started being built, it took the first such ships about 250 days to be built. They took down that number to 150, then to 105, then to 71, then to 30 and then to 10. They even built one in less than 5 days, and that one did survive the war, and kept working until 1963.

The secret was to build large components separately, each on its own assembly line, and then to just snap them together as a giant Lego toy.

The fact that current nuclear reactors take 20 years to build is not a mathematical proof that any design will take as long. It is entirely possible for SMRs to be build in a matter of months, maybe, just like the Liberty ships, in a matter of days. If the politicians in Washington want to make that happen, then the engineers can make it happen.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#152

Post by devonkim »

kuhewa wrote: post #134
TheDudeMan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "nuclear", do you mean all forms of fission reactors? Or do you mean today's inferior designs? Your comment makes sense in the context of conventional light-water reactors. However, there exist more advanced reactor designs that are essentially meltdown-proof.

How close are they to commercial implementation

The small nuclear reactor designs by NuScale are commercially viable and are going to be approved by the nuclear regulatory commission rather soon. Thorium isn’t as important as the small and modular aspects. Also Gen IV and breeder reactors are basically perfectly viable commercially if it was held to the same kind of scrutiny as most other power sources whether it’s coal or solar. But politically it’s not viable which is expressed by being so hard to finance with long time scales that investors simply don’t have the patience and nobody can raise the capital worthwhile to bother trying. It’s very much a chicken-egg dynamic impeding its viability similar to what popular renewables faced for different reasons for several decades.

Note that South Korea and France both have large operational nuclear power that is rather cheap to deploy because they basically copy-paste the same proven design and processes again and again. South Korea in particular has been under constant threat of attack by its neighbors for basically over a thousand years now yet went with nuclear decades ago. Comparatively, Switzerland didn’t choose nuclear for reasons I can’t quite remember even though they are fully capable technologically and in terms of process / bureaucracy able to manage the systems perfectly safely. Unsure about France’s reasoning but it’s difficult to compare power costs between France and neighboring Germany in good faith comparisons of energy policy either due to how different their electrical grid needs are.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#153

Post by Retric »

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…

Hydroelectric dams actively save lives by reducing flooding. It’s the only power source with net negative death rates and as such doesn’t see the same kind of pushback from disasters.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#154

Post by mjhay »

mah4k4l wrote: post #104
throw0101a wrote: post #97

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. Limit your eating of pike, but otherwise no major objections: > Children, young people and persons of fertile age may not eat pike caught in a lake or in the sea more often than once or twice a month. > Dioxin and PCB levels in fish from inland waters are normally low, and mercury l…

Ok yes my bad forgot to post the limits. At least used to be lake fish two times in week tops.

It is not recommended to eat the fish from the river where I live more than twice a month. That's just standard historic mining pollution.

Coal poisons the water far worse, both from mining, air pollution, and coal ash. It even emits far more radiation than nuclear power.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#155

Post by mjhay »

mah4k4l wrote: post #89
tehsauce wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a ridiculous generalization about E. block countries.

> "Everything radiates; just look at the bonfire, it's radiation".

Perhaps you should become a bit more informed before spouting nonsense like this.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#156

Post by cesarb »

otikik wrote: post #82
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.

> 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.

It depends on where you live. In my country (which is a huge country), the backup is hydroelectric dams. Burning fossil fuels (and nuclear) is mostly kept constant during the day, it's the hydroelectric dams which follow both the load and the changes in solar and wind.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#157

Post by scottLobster »

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?

Maybe we should be more concerned about ensuring that there is an advanced civilization to worry about in 10,000 years. We can start by making sure humanity is well situated with energy supplies for the next few centuries, and nuclear is part of the answer to that step.

Besides, nuclear fuel dumps are few and far between, and easily avoided once identified. I'm touched that you care so much about a few individual lives 10,000 years from now, but we've got millions if not billions of lives to worry about in this century.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#159

Post by AinderS »

epistasis wrote: post #119
credit_guy wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the real reason nuclear power did not succeed in the US (I can't speak of other countries). It was opposed by the Democrats, and the Republicans, although some in favor of it, decided they don't want to spend whatever political capital they had on this. Now both Democrats and Republicans are pro nuclear power. You may not like it, but nuclear power is having a comeback.

The last time to start nuclear to address climate change was the mid-2000s. And we did start four reactors, with many more planned! However they are all construction failures, and the two at Summer were actually even abandoned half completed, it was so bad. And executives our going to jail for their lies during the construction process. That's what I mean when I say nobody knows how to build it. We will likely never…

> That's what I mean when I say nobody knows how to build it.

During China's 13th Five-Year Plan period from 2016 to 2020, the country built 20 new nuclear power generators with a total capacity of 23.44 million kilowatts - https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-04-14/China-has-most-nuclear...

So clearly it's possible. With the right policy incentives, there's no reason to believe the US can't replicate China's success in this area.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#160

Post by I_am_tiberius »

mgfist wrote: post #139
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because you have to look at reality. You may be willing to do that (though I doubt it), but people at large do not.

It's very clear to me that what I write is not realistic. But I think it's objectively the best way.
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