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I changed my mind about nuclear waste

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Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#91

Post by refuse »

uoaei wrote: post #46
legitster wrote: post #31

I'm all for fighting the good fight on this, but I'm also a realist: consumer sentiment isn't going to change much. People on the extremes will still fight to the nails on MSG, Flouride in water, GMO, etc. But the median person doesn't really care where their power comes from when they hit a switch so long as it's cheap. If we want any serious progress on Nuclear you need regulators with authority to ignore organized…

Virtually no one who is critical of nuclear thinks that "it's scary" is the best, or even a good, reason for not having nuclear. But loads of analysis have been done on the financials of different energy generation methods and shows very clearly that, except for those contracted to build and maintain the thing, no one sees a real benefit. It simply doesn't pan out to plan and build new nuclear reactors today, conside…

A lot of people say that new reactor designs will be a game changer but I can't help but wonder how much more benefit they'll provide over plain old solar and wind with hydrogen for storage and transport.

After the Ukraine invasion, I think it's also worth considering future political instability in reactor permitting and design. I believe the molten salt reactors negate a lot of the problems we've had to consider with the Zaporozhye nuclear plant being in a war zone, but I'm not sure it comes out to something much better than solar and wind.

The micro reactors sound interesting though.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#92

Post by whatshisface »

tcmart14 wrote: post #33
whatshisface wrote: post #6

> I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy with waste from nuclear weapons. That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the…

Or more importantly, would the same motivators for the military exist for private industries. My example would not be nuclear, but waste in general. I did 5 years in the Navy. Out at sea, by regulations, we have really strict standards of how certain materials get disposed. Clean metal, like aluminum cans from the galley can go overboard, into the ocean, and so can food waste. Plastic can't, batteries cant, etc. Do b…

So, what you are expressing is one perspective on accidents, and it's true - the one guy who cares about cleaning up a spill is a good guy, the one guy who hoses it into a drain is a bad guy. I would like to offer another one.

The water is going to take all of the people who did it right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average their actions together into a single number, the amount of contamination. On the other side, although an individual person can decide whether they're going to make disposing of those batteries easy or a bureaucratic power trip, when you are at the top and are going to fill 1,000 positions like that, you know in advance that some of them are going to be awful about it. So, from the top like from below, individual personal decisions become fixed quantities. Sending out 1,000 people and allowing 250 of them to make the independent personal decision to do it wrong is really the same thing as doing it wrong yourself, because it's guaranteed to happen.

That's essentially the story behind why you should think about accidents as an institutional problem even when they involve bad personal choices on the part of the people who did them. That One Guy is actually hundreds of people and although you can't tell in advance whether one person will do it you know that out of thousands, hundreds will.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#93

Post by the_gastropod »

glitchc wrote: post #11
FullyFunctional wrote: post #2

I don’t think nuclear is evil, but Rosie’s look at the financials suggests there are better options: https://youtu.be/quI_8xYSWYE

Her analysis is fundamentally flawed. For a stable energy source, it cannot be solar alone or wind alone. Rather it needs to be solar plus battery and wind plus battery. Let's factor in the costs of producing maintaining and environmentally disposing of those batteries and let's see how the numbers shake out, ceteris paribus of course.

Batteries aren't the only way to store energy. Here's a short list of other ways to store energy:

- Pumped hydro: Use electricity now to pump water uphill. When power is needed, water is allowed to flow back downhill, powering a turbine to generate electricity.

- Thermal storage: Heat up water or molten salt. This heat can be used directly later (e.g., use hot water for showers) or to power steam turbines to generate electricity

- Flywheels: spin up a heavy wheel, which can "smooth" out power delivery when inputs briefly shut off

- Compressed air: can be stored / used to power turbines to generate electricity later

- Fuel generation: can use electricity during high-production times to generate fuels like hydrogen (electrolysis ) or methane (reverse methanogenesis).

None of these are silver-bullets. But if used intelligently for specific problems, they're excellent tools to help cover the volatile output of wind/solar.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#94

Post by remorses »

denderson wrote: post #74
leemelone wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see a MASSIVE increase in the amount of nuclear power in use around the world. AND, I appreciate calling out conflicts of interest, astroturfing, and artificial "viral" information campaigns. Thank you for outing the author.

There is one problem with Nuclear power that was never talked about before the Ukraine War: War itself. More specifically, war in the area that is powered by nuclear. Damage to reactors, power plant workers fleeing, damage to nuclear waste containers, and more.

Radioactive material is not something you can only find in nuclear plants (you can get same levels of radioactive materials in hospitals for example), there are also much easier ways to cause worse disasters (think about destroying a dam for example)

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#95

Post by xyst »

Nuclear energy should be orthogonal to meeting future energy demand and transitioning to a zero carbon generating economy. While it takes a long time for a nuclear plant to come online and become fully efficient. It's better than sitting on our asses and breathing in the toxic waste generated by fossil fuels.

Additionally, with the recent revelations in fusion, https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-make..., nuclear will be able to provide us with more runway as mankind continues to march forward towards a cleaner future.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#96

Post by photochemsyn »

Just on technical grounds, this is just not a very educational article. Any discussion of waste from the nuclear fission process should begin with an image of the periodic table and a chart of the curve of binding energy (whose peak, or trough, sits on Iron, which the most stable nuclei relative to fusion or fission processes). From there we can take a look at thermal fission product yield:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield

Notably there are two peaks in isotopic distribution, but there are a great many species generated, with varying impact on human health if ingested, depending on whether they mimic species like calcium (in the same column on the periodic table) or are actually used (iodine in the thryoid gland for example). Note also there are some transuranics (plutonium etc.) formed by neutron capture in addition to the fission products.

The risk is that these products don't stay sealed in their cooling pond containers (note that 'spent' is hardly the right term, it's really 'too hot to safely remain in the reactor' as they're still generating lots of energy by decay of the unstable isotopes). Eventually they cool off enough to go into dry cask storage (also a long-term risk).

Usually in these discussions someone trots out a line like 'airplanes are risky, too, but we don't stop flying just because of the rare plane crash, do we?'. The answer to this is that if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination, then we'd think twice about flying (note the nuclear-reactor-powered airplane was on the drawing boards for a while).

The end result of this issue is that nuclear reactors have to be heavily over-engineered to take into account so-called 'black swan' events, see Fukushima. This inevitably raises the costs of nuclear power well above those for any other energy source, which is why many people (myself included) think it doesn't have much of a future except in certain niche situations.

There are other issues, of course - high demand for cooling water, nuclear weapons material proliferation, uncertainties over high-grade uranium ore supplies (i.e. price fluctuations etc.), and so on, but attempting to claim long-term storage of nuclear waste is not a seriously problematic issue is just blatantly dishonest.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#97

Post by ryanjshaw »

whatshisface wrote: post #6

> I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy with waste from nuclear weapons. That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the…

Nuclear reactor fuel is pre-assembled. There are licenses to produce/consume/export/import/store/dispose the fuel assemblies, with the quantities and weights being an exactly known scientific fact. Everything is meticulously recorded and tracked from source to destination, with stringent security measures. Local, international and inter-governmental regulators monitor, inspect and verify; penalties are serious.

Why would you compare commercial nuclear energy production to the military scenarios, which have a completely different legal, supervisory, penalty and authority structure?

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#98

Post by lanstin »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #54
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #18

The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the industry, founded an activist group that claims: > Aim for 50% nuclear at least, as per the science. Which suggests a pretty cavalier attitude to "the science". edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting. I thought the timing was mysteriously exact for both her and Shellenberger…

While these are reasons to be suspicious, they do not counter a single point she made in her article. Her logic and her facts were solid. If they're not, I'd love to see a take down of that. But I see no problem with anything she wrote, I remain convinced nuclear is the only rational energy source left, and all this fear mongering about nuclear is causing us to slowly kill ourselves.

If we had started a serious decarbonization 20 yeats ago, sure, but solar is now so cheap and easy that it will be harder for large scale nuclear to ramp up in time to matter. Maybe those container nuclear plants and maybe the last 20% of base capacit by 2040. But slowing solar in deference to nuclear would prolong the era of high atmospheric carbon.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#99

Post by strbean »

rndmize wrote: post #58

While it's good the author has gained a better understanding of nuclear waste, I feel that they're almost repeating their mistakes in their discussion of renewable waste. I'm fairly sure that everything they listed - solar panels, turbines, batteries - can be recycled; the question generally is whether its cost-effective to do so. (Another important question is probably on whether we want to spend the money on develo…

Right to Repair is incredibly important, but also feels incredibly insufficient in this context. What we really need is Obligation to Repair, or something of that nature. Producers of goods need to be accountable for the lifecycle of those goods.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#100

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

dale_glass wrote: post #48
glitchc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her analysis is fundamentally flawed. For a stable energy source, it cannot be solar alone or wind alone. Rather it needs to be solar plus battery and wind plus battery. Let's factor in the costs of producing maintaining and environmentally disposing of those batteries and let's see how the numbers shake out, ceteris paribus of course.

Unfortunately nuclear doesn't appear to be a viable supplement. Suppose a grid with just nuclear and solar. Nuclear may be overall very stable, but solar is still not, and so you still need storage. The only difference is how much of it you need. But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really economical. Solar is much, much cheaper and therefore any economically minded person would build solar if they had a choi…

> But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really economical.

Against what honest option? If fossil fuel plants had to charge to cover the deaths from pollution they'd be blistering expensive.

It could just as easily be said that nuclear power is the only source we can truly afford.

> The business model of nuclear is just broken in modern times.

Right, because it's not really a business. Power is infrastructure.

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