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Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

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Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#31

Post by ChatGTP »

ajuc wrote: post #20
gmerc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a plane crash…

Less people died in Fukushima accident than dies yearly because of coal powerplants pumping radioactive materials into atmosphere. If you calculate radioactive materials released per energy produced - nuclear is below coal, even including all the accidents. It's irrational to avoid nuclear powerplants.

Have you seen the economic costs of the cleanup operation though? It's absolutely astronomical (for various reasons). That money is not money going to new nuclear plants or renewables, but going to nowhere.

This effects people too.

Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending on how you look at it) Is this controversial or something? Is that not a lot of money and an unaccounted for cost of nuclear?

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#32

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

himinlomax wrote: post #9
LatteLazy wrote: post #2

Expensive though.

Solar panels are cheaper. They're also useless at night or in winter at higher latitude. The question is not whether it's expensive, the question is whether it's worth the price.

Renewables != solar.

Renewables = a mix of solar, wind, hydro, geo, and wave, backed up by storage and a more efficient grid, supplement by various local - down to household - generation options. Supported by smarter and larger grids.

The absolute criminality of the last few decades means that renewable tech is decades behind where it could have been with a no-compromise crash development program starting in the 90s.

The real problem with renewable has always been political. Renewables are inherently diverse and distributed. They're not limited to a very small number of critical supply chains and economic choke points. And some people are really unhappy about that.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#34

Post by willis936 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #32
himinlomax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar panels are cheaper. They're also useless at night or in winter at higher latitude. The question is not whether it's expensive, the question is whether it's worth the price.

Renewables != solar. Renewables = a mix of solar, wind, hydro, geo, and wave, backed up by storage and a more efficient grid, supplement by various local - down to household - generation options. Supported by smarter and larger grids. The absolute criminality of the last few decades means that renewable tech is decades behind where it could have been with a no-compromise crash development program starting in the 90s.…

Renewables are popular with most demos. What's even more popular is low LCOE. The technical challenges of energy storage can be hand waved away, but not if you want to actually solve the problems.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#35

Post by zerodensity »

zokier wrote: post #7

If humans were perfect then all problems are trivial. In cryptography there is the idea of misuse resistance, and the same line of thinking applies to other fields where things are expected to be used at scale. Wind and solar are pretty much idiot-proof, and their low density means that the risks are spread out also. As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following the process of OL3, I am pretty pes…

> Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.

If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement.

We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there.

Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000 land yes.

Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#36

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

Tade0 wrote: post #8

> But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to pr…

If nuclear safety rules would be applied to dams, we would need to tear them all down, because those devilish things killed thousand times more people than nuclear ever did.

Also a big chemical plant failure has potential to kill more people than all nuclear failures combined - See Bhopal disaster

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#37

Post by rayiner »

Nuclear is the only optimistic energy solution—I.e. one that could enable continually increasing human prosperity, rather than rationing. Forget simply replacing today’s energy generation. That’s sad. What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? Moreover, technology that will “level up” civilization is almost certainly going to be an outgrowth of nuclear development, or something similarly energetic, rather than windmills or solar.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#38

Post by _n_b_ »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #12

The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc. Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil. Important to note that the image is…

> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline.

In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are coming, and the Palisades unit may restart… so I think you’ll see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will try to get a further life extension to 80 years.

Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.)

This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or advanced reactors—-some of those will certainly get built too.

[1] https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#39

Post by vmladenov »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #12

The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc. Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil. Important to note that the image is…

> We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output.

This was Tesla’s main claim at their recent energy presentation. Page 4 of the doc[1] shows our waste heat to useful work is roughly 2 to 1

[1] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#40

Post by meghan_rain »

eaasen wrote: post #30

[flagged]

> operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion”

Indeed a gem. Or do you want a nuclear power plant in your neighbourhood managed by people who happen to be the pet-minority-du-jour on Twitter?

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