Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

nationalinterest.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 568 posts

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#421

Post by Krasnol »

evilos wrote: post #407
Krasnol wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know "compact" makes anything better about it. Germany has been searching for a hole safe and deep enough for it for years. It costs taxpayer money and they still haven't found one. Meanwhile, the stuff is stored near the plants. Which is not safe. Also stuff which has been considered "safely stored" years ago needs to be dug out again. Which again costs taxpayer money.

Dry cask storage on site is absolutely safe. It's dry waste, there's nothing to leak. It sits in reinforced concrete casks that are rated to last over a hundred years. After that, you can just put it in a new cask and repeat. There's not very much of it so you can just keep it at the site.

Germany alone has 120.000m³ low and mid waste which needs to be stored. However only a small part of it is ready to be stored (in the safe and deep hole Germany still couldn't find).

2016 they had 15.000t of spend fuel.

When all the plants are gone, Germany will have 300.000m³ of waste which needs to disappear for a long time in hope that nobody will ever get the idea of digging it out again.

No nuclear company will want to have to do with anything of that. They paid some ridiculous amount of money for their subsidized profits, and the taxpayers will have to deal with it for the next thousands of years.

Nuclear technology is overdue.

There are better, cheaper and cleaner alternatives already out there.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#422

Post by evilos »

Krasnol wrote: post #421
evilos wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dry cask storage on site is absolutely safe. It's dry waste, there's nothing to leak. It sits in reinforced concrete casks that are rated to last over a hundred years. After that, you can just put it in a new cask and repeat. There's not very much of it so you can just keep it at the site.

Germany alone has 120.000m³ low and mid waste which needs to be stored. However only a small part of it is ready to be stored (in the safe and deep hole Germany still couldn't find). 2016 they had 15.000t of spend fuel. When all the plants are gone, Germany will have 300.000m³ of waste which needs to disappear for a long time in hope that nobody will ever get the idea of digging it out again. No nuclear company will…

Low/mid waste is mostly just normal trash after it sits for a year or two. Going through the trouble and expense of burying all of it like it's spent nuclear fuel is just wasted money. We spend billions of dollars pretending lightly radioactive material is going to kill someone. Not one person has ever died from handling nuclear waste.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#423

Post by _heimdall »

evilos wrote: post #387
_heimdall wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coal has killed tens of millions from air pollution alone. That stat is effectively impossible to nail down after the fact. Air pollution is one metric of am extremely complex system, and coal or any other energy source is one of countless inputs impacting the environment simultaneously. At best we can design and run models to help get clues on what impact any one input has, but those models will always be rough hi…

> That stat is effectively impossible to nail down after the fact Sure, but given how long we've been burning coal and how dirty it is I'm positive that tens of millions is a gross undercount. It's not about getting an exact number. We're looking for orders of magnitudes here.

Orders of magnitude really don't gloss over huge confidence intervals though, that's just attempting to game the stats.

I get what you're going for and anecdotally that number doesn't even seem crazy if you're going back through our entire history of coal. At the end of the day that number simply didn't exist though, and any time someone uses a start like that to bank up an argument it's just propaganda. Having a bunch that number should be accurate is very different from being able to use it as part of a larger discussion of what the biggest problems are and how to improve it.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#424

Post by SECProto »

Retric wrote: post #211
throw0101b wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear power supplies about 50 - 60% of electric energy in Ontario, with 18 reactors currently operating, built 1970s - 1990s. Cf, "Supply" tab: * https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data

Yep, and that looks great wind, hydro, and nuclear providing 100% of power at 3pm on a Friday at 2.5c/kWh. But what happens on the weekend when demand for power drops even more? Unfortunately the nuclear power plant operator losses money even faster than they are right now.

> Unfortunately the nuclear power plant operator losses money even faster than they are right now.

Note that Ontario Power Generation, who owns all the nuclear plants in Ontario, has a positive net income of roughly 20% of gross, and is building Canada's first new nuclear plant in a couple decades. Your generalization is incorrect.

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

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#425

Post by throw0101b »

Retric wrote: post #211
throw0101b wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear power supplies about 50 - 60% of electric energy in Ontario, with 18 reactors currently operating, built 1970s - 1990s. Cf, "Supply" tab: * https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data

Yep, and that looks great wind, hydro, and nuclear providing 100% of power at 3pm on a Friday at 2.5c/kWh. But what happens on the weekend when demand for power drops even more? Unfortunately the nuclear power plant operator losses money even faster than they are right now.

> But what happens on the weekend when demand for power drops even more?

Umm… generation is taken offline?

Usually Gas and Hydro if renewables are available. If renewables drop then Gas and Hydro are brought back up.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#426

Post by throw0101b »

Retric wrote: post #400
k8wk1 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low electricity costs are a problem for all electricity plans, not only nuclear. Renewables are even more susceptible to this because the weather affects all renewable plants of the same type similarly across wide geographic areas, so there will be times when they all generate more than is needed and nothing can be done about it. What's worse, the output is unpredictable, so there's little opportunity for some busine…

Low is relative, in most areas a 3c/kWh wholesale price is wildly profitable for solar and a massive loss for nuclear. Renewables very much provide surplus power at scale, but they don’t always provide that massive surplus. So, Solar could provide 3/4 of its power when wholesale prices are below 1c/kWh and the economics still end up working out over the year. Meanwhile every other source of power needs to deal with e…

> So, Solar could provide 3/4 of its power when wholesale prices are below 1c/kWh […]

Except at night.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#427

Post by cyberax »

pfdietz wrote: post #408
cyberax wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question your estimation of the capital cost. LCOE for most nuclear power plants is way below that: https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/ For the US it's $33 per MWh, so doubling it still gives reasonable cost. As for wind, it simply can not compete right now for guaranteed capacity. The adequacy rating for most wind power plants is around 10%, so you need 10x overbuild to even compete.

Many of the entries in that table (LTO) are for 20 year life extensiom of existing plants, not new plants.

And so what? Modern nuclear reactors are licensed for 60 years and are expected to last 80-100 years with maintenance (reactor vessel annealing, mainly).

This is exactly a point in favor of nuclear.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#428

Post by philipkglass »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #317
tremon wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of a power source that is resilient to politics? I struggle to imagine what that would even look like.

Solar + battery doesn’t bother anyone. Wind turbines have mild resistance from people who think they are an eyesore or people worried about migratory birds.

I wish it were true that solar and battery projects didn't bother anyone. Some recent examples of opposition to solar and battery projects:

"Jacumba residents sue to stop 600-acre solar project"

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2021-09-...

"Proposed battery storage site in Eden Valley prompts local worries"

https://thecoastnews.com/proposed-battery-storage-site-in-ed...

"The Energy Transition Runs Into a Ditch in Rural Ohio"

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29072022/williamsport-ohi...

"An activist group is stopping rural US solar farms with lies"

https://electrek.co/2023/02/20/an-activist-group-is-stopping...

"Marin battery storage project sparks early opposition"

https://www.marinij.com/2023/03/13/marin-battery-storage-pro...

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#429

Post by evilos »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #414
evilos wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately that's not true. The fission products that are actually dangerous only stick around for 300 to 600 years [1]. After that, you'd have to ingest what is left to be harmed. We have existing facilities [2] in the US where we can bury waste in such a way that it essentially becomes crystalized in salt after 100 years. Water moves centimeters per billion years in this salt. This one facility could easily servic…

Except it is true because Pu-239 and other transuranic isotopes absolutely are a thing. In the case of Pu-239 it's half-life is ~20,000 years. Given the 10 half-life minimum storage requirements for high level radioactive waste, we're at 200,000 years, which is 40 times the length of recorded human history or if you prefer 2/3 of the time our species has provably existed on the planet.

Nope, half life is inversely proportional to danger. The longer the half life, the less dangerous it is to handle an isotope. You can hold Plutonium and Uranium in your hand without issue.

You'd have to eat lots of Pu-239 to get sick and we know this for a fact unfortunately because of the insane story of Albert Stevens [1] who got the highest radiation dose of any known human and lived to be 79. He was one of 18 people injected with plutonium. None of the patients died from the injections. Why injection instead of ingestion? Because the body is actually very bad at absorbing Pu when it is eaten.

Let me just emphasize again that we INJECTED A MAN WITH PURE PLUTONIUM and he was fine. Nuclear waste is not the problem you think it is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#430

Post by screye »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #310

Except in the real world where wind + solar account for the vast majority of GW added. Nuclear just doesn't matter. It's 2023, there's an energy crisis on. Where are the new nuclear plants in Europe? Where are the GW of power saving us from rolling blackouts in Europe? Nuclear is a no show. It didn't happen. Not even a little bit. It didn't matter. Too little (well barely anything at all), too late. There's this pesk…

Nuclear is the only type of energy that can guarantee a low variability in production.

> But when it comes to cost, they suddenly check out,

Nuclear is expensive because of 2 reasons. First, because we didn't build any, we have zero momentum savings. Second, it is expensive because we make it expensive. Nuclear has to be orders of magnitude safer than any other form of energy. If raw material mining for solar had the same kind of limitations (per human-year lost), then solar would be prohibitively expensive too. If disposal of waste (pollution) for coal/natural gas was as stringent (adjusted to human years lost), then they too would be prohibitively expensive. Nuclear costs are technically quite low. We have scared ourselves into making it so expensive that it is impossible to build.

> wind + solar

You conveniently mention the 2 form of electric production that nuclear does not compete with. Consistent-electricity comes in the form of petroleum, hydro-power and nuclear energy. We need consistent energy. Nuclear replaces petroleum and hydro-power, both of which are significantly worse for the environment and cause much higher median and worst-case loss of life than nuclear energy. If we could build nuclear power plants with the sort of carelessness that coal and hydro-power plants are, then nuclear would've been the dominant form of consistent energy production.

_______

My suspicion is that the lack of nuclear powerplants is because of perverse economic incentives for countries with uranium supplies. The nations with the largest uranium reserves [1] are either already oil/coal producing countries and do not need uranium disrupting their own economy (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa) or do not have the technological knowhow to execute on a nuclear power plant (Namibia, Niger).

The exceptions are China and India, both of which therefore pushing for more nuclear power. [2] [3] "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_India#:~:text....

Post reply on HN