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I changed my mind about nuclear waste

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Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#141

Post by LarryMullins »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #131
remorses wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

A destroyed dam is temporary damage. There are going to be eventually gravely ill Russian soldiers last year because they ignored the warnings in the Chernobyl exclusion area. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/world/europe/ukraine-cher... > In a particularly ill-advised action, a Russian soldier from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit picked up a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site with his…

"Temporary damage", really? The deaths of those downstream from a burst dam are no less permanent than the death of an irradiated Russian. And there are a lot more of the former than the latter.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#142

Post by philipkglass »

Aloha wrote: post #118
lanstin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we could build 100 plants in under a decade - it takes us being willing to build them assembly line like, meaning no more 'designed for the site' plants.

The EPR and AP1000 reactor designs were supposed to be the end of "designed for the site" reactors, and they were. The same designs get built at different geographic locations. The problem is that they're no better at meeting cost and schedule targets than older reactor designs. They're still late and over budget.

Can small modular reactors like those designed by NuScale do better? Maybe. But we're not going to find out sooner than 2030, which is when NuScale plans to have its first plant operational: https://www.nuscalepower.com/en/about

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#144

Post by anonymouskimmer »

qclibre22 wrote: post #109
stareatgoats wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GWPF The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a British foundation highly critical of the anthropogenic global warming scientific consensus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foun...

> anthropogenic global warming scientific consensus Isn't there some serious, vigorous debate on this topic?

The only real debate is whether completely upending the climate in a very short (ecologically speaking) time frame will be net beneficial for humans or net detrimental for humans. We know it will be net detrimental for the general ecology and currently existing species.

And from what I've read a bunch of the people claiming it will be a benefit for humans are speaking strictly on an economic basis, not a quality of life basis.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#145

Post by [deleted] »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #97
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 w…

[deleted]

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#146

Post by mjhay »

rayiner wrote: post #87
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…

> Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby. At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo that was likely to stand until today…

The fossil fuel lobby has actually promoted nuclear FUD, including by funding anti-science "environmentalist" groups.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#147

Post by yongjik »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #116
nickelcitymario wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fossil fuel industry is not funding pro-nuclear arguments because they want to see 50% of their business lost to nuclear. They are not worried about losing huge profits to nuclear because from a purely economic perspective nuclear is not cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Hence it doesn’t pose a major threat, absent massive government-subsidized build-outs (which aren’t remotely on the table now.) The fossil fue…

> The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR because they realize that renewables do pose a major economic threat to their business in the short term

Last time I heard, it wasn't pro-nuclear France that urgently built a new LNG terminal, it was staunchly anti-nuclear Germany (in 2023!!). So I have doubt about your analysis.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#148

Post by tonyarkles »

lanstin wrote: post #98
nickelcitymario wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but solar is now so cheap and easy that it will be harder for large scale nuclear to ramp up in time to matter

There's still the storage and base load problem. But I am 100% with you that we shouldn't slow solar in deference to nuclear; what we should be doing is mapping out what we want our next generation energy mix to look like (solar, wind, pumped storage, nuclear, geothermal, etc) on a regional basis, stop fucking around and arguing about it, and just get on with building it.

I live in an area (Canadian prairies) where max energy consumption lines up with with minimum solar and wind production (-40C in December on a calm night). Even during the day, those calm bitterly cold days only have about 8 hours of sunlight from a sun that barely comes over the horizon. We're starting to build solar, we've had wind for a while, but even though we've committed to building SMR Nuclear, we're still in a situation where we've got coal and natural gas plants that are approaching EOL and they'll likely be replaced/retrofitted to burn more fossil fuels because we won't have any sufficiently reliable baseload ready.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#150

Post by sgu999 »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #116
nickelcitymario wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fossil fuel industry is not funding pro-nuclear arguments because they want to see 50% of their business lost to nuclear. They are not worried about losing huge profits to nuclear because from a purely economic perspective nuclear is not cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Hence it doesn’t pose a major threat, absent massive government-subsidized build-outs (which aren’t remotely on the table now.) The fossil fue…

> The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR because they realize that renewables do pose a major economic threat to their business in the short term, since they are now cost-effective enough to replace vast chunks of their business (even if not 100% of it.)

I wonder if it's not even more cynical than that because it doesn't seem right. We still need an alternative controllable* source of energy when renewables can't cover the demand (no wind, no sunshine), and it needs to cover peak demand... For now aside from hydro it's mostly fossil fuels: coal, gas and oil.

As far as the current tech goes, my understanding is that "renewables" are much more compatible with profits from fossil fuel than nuclear power is.

* is "controllable" the right word in this context in english?

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