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I changed my mind about nuclear waste

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Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#391

Post by cycomanic »

vidarh wrote: post #377
cycomanic wrote: post #363

> All the high-level nuclear waste produced in the world would fit in a single football field to a height of approximately ten yards. > The amount of high-level waste produced during nuclear energy production is also small: a typical large reactor produces about 25-30 tonnes of used fuel per year. That's such a propaganda way of phrasing it, because it considers the waste is essentially pure uranium you would never b…

> Incidentally this is about the same amount of coal we burn per year. Who are "we"? The US alone consumed about 545 million short ton of coal in 2021 [1]. From what I can tell, that's in the range of 400 million m^3. Did I get the numbers wrong? (I just semi-randomly picked a converter online as I have no reference point to how heavy a cubic meter of coal is). Because that does not seem at all like about the same am…

That's the whole point about my criticism. Uranium is incredibly dense so phrasing it in terms of volume of the uranium is just misleading.

Regarding the calculation https://www.worldometers.info/coal/ says we are burning 1,147,083 cubic feet of coal which is about 30000 cubic meters which is about the same as a football field up to 10 yards (~50mx90mx10m).

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#392

Post by Schroedingersat »

concordDance wrote: post #300
wcerfgba wrote: post #238

> But radiation hasn’t harmed anywhere near as many people as fossil fuels. The implication with both this statement and the map is that we should be comparing the total number of people who died from radiation, and the total from fossil fuels, and see which is bigger, but there are other ways of evaluating (potential) harms. Nuclear power and other radtech is not equally common around the world, and neither are foss…

In deaths per KWh nuclear is king, with a thousandth of the deaths of gas and ten thousandth of coal. Until recently even solar was worse due to installers sometimes falling off roofs! E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... I really do not understand why almost no one bothers to spend a couple of minutes looking up the actual numbers and analysis that people have been doing for decades..…

Because the 'actual numbers' were protested against even by the scientists on whose work they are based and represent (or rather misrepresent) what an industry that is constantly trying to cut corners does when there is enough attention and scepticism to go around to stop them before they do anything critically stupid.

In spite of various plant operators' attempts, no serious accident has ever occured because there are mass protests and an industry regulator which hasn't been captured (yet). There is no precedent for this ever continuing if a toxic industry is accepted by the public and every precedent of it turning into a relationship like chevron has with the amazon.

Solar is also front loaded, whereas nuclear stays an existential threat to an entire region for decades after decomissioning at the very least. The risk from plants that shut down in the 60s has not yet passed.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#393

Post by Schroedingersat »

vidarh wrote: post #379
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However rooftop solar reduces the need for a grid and grid maintenance. Are the deaths due to grid building and maintenance accounted for in these figures? It looks to be based on just production, not production plus distribution.

And solar increases the need for storage. There are certainly all kinds of indirect effects that might skew those numbers, and so it's very much possible solar does better. That isn't really the point - the point is that nuclear is a whole lot safer than many widespread alternatives. While some would like nuclear to replace solar as well, I think most of those of us who see nuclear as unnecessarily maligned are more…

> German decision to shut down nuclear plants and as a consequence needing to run coal plants longer will likely cause more deaths than all nuclear plants combined through the history of nuclear power

That's a funny way of spelling cancelling tens to hundreds of gigawatts of renewable investment which was to replace those nuclear reactors and the fossil fuels and replacing them with gas.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#394

Post by Aeolun »

denton-scratch wrote: post #273
Aeolun wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your cup of water become irradiated from having a hot spoon stuck in it? I think the water is mostly safe. At worst the water will have little slivers of radioactive material floating in it but that’s only if something already went wrong, so I imagine it’s cleaned before being discharged. Ultimately you can also cool it down and reuse it, so you might not need all that much water relatively speaking.

> so I imagine it’s cleaned before being discharged. There's plutonium dust in the silt under the Irish Sea, off the coast from Sellafield. Inhaling a single particle of plutonium dust (much smaller than a 'sliver') can kill you. I think your imagination has misled you.

Just because it’s ‘cleaned’ doesn’t mean it’s perfectly clean after doing so.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#395

Post by bryanlarsen »

tonyarkles wrote: post #389
bryanlarsen wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm not sure if rooftop can quite cut it for Saskatchewan like it can for Australia for instance. I've got one family member in Saskatchewan with rooftop solar looking at numbers similar to you. Another has 40 acres and a honey operation so just has ground mounted solar and often zeroes his electricity bill even during winter months, although he's still using gas for heating. Just got a heat pump water heater,…

Yeah, like, the nice thing about those numbers is that it does work out that solar can very clearly be an effective part of the mix. Out at our family’s farm, there’s a pretty much perfect spot for a long line of solar panels at the south end of the yard that would have no problem zeroing out the electrical bill (is SaskPower still doing net metering? I don’t even know) and probably reducing some of the gas bill as w…

>is SaskPower still doing net metering?

As of last year they just give a 25% credit.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#396

Post by timbit42 »

danans wrote: post #130

> I also learned that batteries cannot be recycled. That's straight up misinformation

It depends on what they mean by "cannot". It cannot be recycled today but it can be recycled when facilities are built to do it. The batteries currently in EVs will go to non-transportation uses when it is no longer able to be used in EVs. Then it will need recycling and that is when the recycling facilities will be built and begin recycling batteries.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#397

Post by spopejoy »

legitster wrote: post #110
AlanSE wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I agree with the "organized civilian protestation" entirely. While NIMBY did play a role historically, this seems out-of-touch when I consider the mothballed & troubled builds which are currently in South Carolina. I do believe regulators have their foot on the brakes, and there are some really telling stories from people in the actual industry. The level of paperwork and scrutiny are hard to fathom f…

Well, I largely think that NIMBY is still at play. If you are a senator you have nothing to gain with a nuclear reactor in your district. Compare this to Japan that doesn't have ridiculously cheap natural gas, and yet is still doubling down on nuclear despite Fukushima and constant protest. I think renewables are amazing and have a long way still to go, but I look at the current energy mix and it's hard to see a 100%…

> Well, I largely think that NIMBY is still at play

Citation needed? The argument that "those gosh-darn environmentalists ruined nuclear" have been countered repeatedly by simply focusing on the huge economic headwinds facing any nuclear project, while renewables gallop into an ever-cheaper future.

Even making the claim that environmental activism resulted in overaggressive regulation is hard to back up, since agencies like the NRC and IAEA are made up of mainly nuclear industry figures who are hardly anti-nuke.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#398

Post by shortcake27 »

Krssst wrote: post #385
shortcake27 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which ones? Norway 98% since 2016. Costa Rica 98% since 2015. Scotland 97% in 2020. Uruguay 98% in 2021. New Zealand pushing close to 90%. > Are we talking 90%, an the entire year, without creative accounting? I don’t know what this means. If a country reports that X amount of energy came from a particular source in a particular year, that means the entire year. And if you believe these countries are lying and doin…

Norway: large hydro resources, low population. Costa Rica: 80% hydro. Scotland: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-56530424 says that renewable met 97% of energy demand, which does not mean that clean electricity was produced when it was needed in Scotland. Considering that this means the country could run at 97% of its production potential with only RE is what I consider "creative accounting". (the article does no…

Keep in mind it is also possible for countries to export electricity; for the world to be powered by renewables each country needs not produce 100% of it’s own energy demands.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#400

Post by wirrbel »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #278
wirrbel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You would have thought that France would have supplied the European continent with electricity now that Russia cut its gas supply, but it turns out that France received electricity from…

Our national energy company EDF has been the largest energy exporter in Europe for ages, in 2019 it was the largest in the world. In addition to that it's made us the cleanest country in the continent for close to 40 years (along with hydro-rich countries). The notion that 2022 is a smoking gun for nuclear is ridiculous. All it reflects is the past 12 years of successive liberal governments writing laws and reforms t…

that is if La Hague isn't leaking nuclear waste
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