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Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

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

#561

Post by btreecat »

cyberax wrote: post #538
btreecat wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So where's the "solar spills" or "wind contamination?" One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety. If I had to make long term bets, radioactive materials will continue to be radioactive, green capture, storage and transmission will get cheaper and more reliable. Speaking of transmission, that's another huge problem. You c…

> So where's the "solar spills" or "wind contamination?" At the factories that produce silicon and composites for the windblades. > One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety. So far, no large country has managed to move to 100% carbon-free renewable generation. And I'm not seeing this changing. > Distributed collection a…

> At the factories that produce silicon and composites for the windblades.

And if we compared these factories and their environmental impacts we would see a net increase from the production of solar and wind products? That's the point, and you ducked it hard.

> So far, no large country has managed to move to 100% carbon-free renewable generation. And I'm not seeing this changing.

Who said that we had to hit 100%? There is a place for burning stuff for fuels in our society for long to come, the point is not having it the default way we power larger systems.

> If we're talking about Europe, they are facing the problem of Dunkelflaute - long periods of no wind, no sun, and low temperatures in the middle of the winter. A worst-case once-in-century scenario would require around a _month_ of storage.

> So far no technology is even close to that.

Okay, that's a great argument to not continue investing in storage solutions, but let's be real, a new nuclear steam turbine isn't coming online _tomorrow_ either.

Let's do both, and not pretend like the more risky one is less dangerous than it is, when things go wrong.

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

#562

Post by pfdietz »

cyberax wrote: post #538
btreecat wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So where's the "solar spills" or "wind contamination?" One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety. If I had to make long term bets, radioactive materials will continue to be radioactive, green capture, storage and transmission will get cheaper and more reliable. Speaking of transmission, that's another huge problem. You c…

> So where's the "solar spills" or "wind contamination?" At the factories that produce silicon and composites for the windblades. > One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety. So far, no large country has managed to move to 100% carbon-free renewable generation. And I'm not seeing this changing. > Distributed collection a…

Dunkelflaute can be dealt with by burning hydrogen, not fossil fuels. You need backup turbines, but a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is about 20x as cheap to build as a nuclear power plant, per unit of power output. So backing up the entire grid with these "Dunkelflaute turbines" is not expensive compared to the nuclear solution.

Europe has many petawatt hours of potential hydrogen storage capacity in its salt formations.

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

#563

Post by willis936 »

llsf wrote: post #436
willis936 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're likely referring to p+B11 fusion which is a potentially viable reaction that emits all its energy as accelerated charged particles (a current), which can, in theory, be slowed down by inducing a current in a coil (direct conversion). This skips the thermal cycle of electricity generation. There would still be heat, but it would be contained to the plasma with some amount of leak/waste. There are a great numbe…

Interesting. But I suspect it would take quite some time to get something like that in production. Nonetheless, we should keep do research, it could be the next generation of fusion reactors.

It depends on how bullish you are on Zap and Helion.

I think it is exciting times, but there are inevitable booms and busts in hype and funding. Results are what matter, and those are coming.

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

#564

Post by forgetfreeman »

evilos wrote: post #429
forgetfreeman wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

You can hold these isotopes in your hand for how long without issue? I've got known alpha and gamma emitters in the house as we speak (side effect of fossil hunting in the Morrison formation) so I'm not exactly harboring some delusion that radioactive == WERE ALL GOING TO DIE. You don't get to use short-term exposure non-effects to sweep long term exposure effects under the rug, and given the only institution in recorded history that has maintained it's existence long enough to even start considering them viable to manage a nuclear waste containment project is the Catholic Church I'd say yeah it absolutely is the problem I think it is.

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

#565

Post by evilos »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #564
evilos wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

You can hold these isotopes in your hand for how long without issue? I've got known alpha and gamma emitters in the house as we speak (side effect of fossil hunting in the Morrison formation) so I'm not exactly harboring some delusion that radioactive == WERE ALL GOING TO DIE. You don't get to use short-term exposure non-effects to sweep long term exposure effects under the rug, and given the only institution in reco…

Indefinitely since they are alpha emitters. This kind of radiation is stopped by almost anything like paper and the dead outer layer of skin and so is harmless unless you ingest the source.

Fact is, the waste that everyone is worried about (used nuclear rods) is not actually waste. 90%+ of the energy is still in there. It's just that the dominant reactor technology isn't designed to extract it. It would be dumb to bury this energy. It would be better to reprocess it like France does or even better, build the kinds of reactors that can directly use it as fuel.

Then you're left with fission products that you can bury it several kilometers underground in a deep borehole using oil/gas technology. It will naturally decay away in 300 to 600 years. Remember, most industrial toxins are toxic forever. There is no amount of time that will render it safe, and we don't even particularly try to isolate it because there's so much. It is only for nuclear waste that we try so hard. And it's only feasible because there's so little of it. All the spent nuclear rods (civilian) the US has EVER produced in 70 years fits in a football field at 30 feet high. Meanwhile a single coal plant produces 1100 tons of just ash a DAY. Not to mention all the air pollution and greenhouse gases. A single plant.

The waste aspect of nuclear energy is amazingly convenient in comparison.

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

#566

Post by evilos »

pvaldes wrote: post #509
q1w2 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what it is - which is why the comment above is so profoundly dishonest. You can buy tritium on Amazon - it's harmless.

> That's exactly what it is - which is why the comment above is so profoundly dishonest. Please, could you explain why US, EU and Canada governments have set narrow legal upper limits for Tritium presence on drinking water if is soo totally harmless? And why is recommended "extended strong medical/therapeutic intervention" [1] in some cases of accidental exposure to Tritium if is not dangerous? If you define the qual…

There's been so few serious Tritium exposures in humans so we don't know how much it would take to cause serious harm in humans. There have been some limited studies done on things like yeast and mice which suggest you'd have to ingest an extreme concentration of it to see increases in cancer rates.

Here's a chart with various drinking water limits included: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FplBOWxWAAAT_Jz?format=jpg&name=...

Backing study: https://academic.oup.com/jrr/article/62/4/557/6256015

> Leaking Tritium in some obscure dose is a problem just because 1. the dose is unknown and 2. we are mostly made of water.

NRC regulates and monitors tritium spills quite actively. Here's an excerpt from their page on Tritium: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/t...

> As an example, drinking water for a year from a well with 1,600 picocuries per liter of tritium (comparable to levels identified in a drinking water well after a significant tritiated water spill at a nuclear facility) would lead to a radiation dose (using EPA assumptions) of 0.3 millirem (mrem). That dose is:

- at least 2,000 to 5,000 times lower than the dose from a medical procedure involving a full-body CT scan (e.g., 500 to 1,500 mrem from a CT scan)

- 1,000 times lower than the approximate 300 mrem dose from natural background radiation

- 50 times lower than the dose from natural radioactivity (potassium) in your body (e.g., 15 mrem from potassium)

- 12 times lower than the dose from a round-trip cross-country airplane flight (e.g., 4 mrem from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles and back)

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

#567

Post by forgetfreeman »

evilos wrote: post #565
forgetfreeman wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can hold these isotopes in your hand for how long without issue? I've got known alpha and gamma emitters in the house as we speak (side effect of fossil hunting in the Morrison formation) so I'm not exactly harboring some delusion that radioactive == WERE ALL GOING TO DIE. You don't get to use short-term exposure non-effects to sweep long term exposure effects under the rug, and given the only institution in reco…

Indefinitely since they are alpha emitters. This kind of radiation is stopped by almost anything like paper and the dead outer layer of skin and so is harmless unless you ingest the source. Fact is, the waste that everyone is worried about (used nuclear rods) is not actually waste. 90%+ of the energy is still in there. It's just that the dominant reactor technology isn't designed to extract it. It would be dumb to bu…

Nah. You ignore the fact that alpha emitters (like literally anything else) can crap up their surroundings with micro-particles, and while you might be perfectly happy to hold an alpha emitting isotope in your hand you're gonna feel a lot different once you start ingesting them. As stated above your 600 year timescale is off by close to three orders of magnitude, and you appear to be pretending groundwater either doesn't exist or can't move. End of the day you're dead-ass wrong, as is evidenced by the fact that longterm stable storage of high level nuclear waste remains an unsolved problem despite the technology you're proposing having existed in some capacity for roughly a century before the first functional nuclear power plant went online.

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

#568

Post by evilos »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #567
evilos wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indefinitely since they are alpha emitters. This kind of radiation is stopped by almost anything like paper and the dead outer layer of skin and so is harmless unless you ingest the source. Fact is, the waste that everyone is worried about (used nuclear rods) is not actually waste. 90%+ of the energy is still in there. It's just that the dominant reactor technology isn't designed to extract it. It would be dumb to bu…

Nah. You ignore the fact that alpha emitters (like literally anything else) can crap up their surroundings with micro-particles, and while you might be perfectly happy to hold an alpha emitting isotope in your hand you're gonna feel a lot different once you start ingesting them. As stated above your 600 year timescale is off by close to three orders of magnitude, and you appear to be pretending groundwater either doe…

> You ignore the fact that alpha emitters (like literally anything else) can crap up their surroundings with micro-particles

What on earth are you talking about? You realize you are full of alpha emitters?

> As stated above your 600 year timescale is off by close to three orders of magnitude

Nope, see this chart: https://whatisnuclear.com/img/ingestion-radiotoxicity-nuclea...

> you appear to be pretending groundwater either doesn't exist or can't move

That's why you bury it in rock where it doesn't move and we know it doesn't. Like the Permian Basin or where the Oklo natural reactors occurred in Gabon.

Oh yes, did you know nature formed fission reactors billions of years before we did ever existed? This always pisses off the hippies when I tell them. And guess what? The fission products from this natural process moved mere centimeters over 2 billion years.

This is a solved problem. It's just that some people desperately want it not to be.

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