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Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

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Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#101

Post by joecool1029 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #80
PaulKeeble wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another aspect is the power it costs to make the power. Oil is a huge industry with enormous transport fuel usage. Nowadays about a 6th of the energy goes into collection. The more we electrify the more that will be saved too coming off the total power we need. Solar, Wind, Hydro and Nuclear are all vastly better in this aspect on production costs and little ongoing transport.

Good point. Oil tankers by themselves put out a measurable percentage of CO2. Also oil refining is an energy intensive industry. Ironically, a lot of that has been cleaned up. It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product. That's why Texas has so much renewable power.

> It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product.

Until it's winter, the ground is frozen, and they have no reserves to burn. Then there's a panic to get the same nonrenewables they would normally flare off when the weather is sunny and breezy.

> That's why Texas has so much renewable power.

It has tons of underdeveloped land in a region with good wind and favorable sunlight. That's it.

Texas, like Germany's lignite (shit coal) renaissance, is a terrible example of good energy policy. Keep in mind Texas is also on its own grid and struggles to pay people to burn the excess energy they can't use since they also can't easily send it outside their grid and have almost no means to store the excess.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#102

Post by goodpoint »

refurb wrote: post #33
bullen wrote: post #17

Maybe, but the heat added to earth has to be radiated away from earth. We have never added energy from matter at this scale before. Same for fusion.

Global energy production in 2019: 617 x 10^18 J Global energy from the sun per day : 430 x 10^18 J

This does not take into account that the planet was in balance before human activities has started impacting it. Plus earth reflectivity is decreasing due to human intervention e.g. deforestation.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#103

Post by goodpoint »

goodpoint wrote: post #29
bullen wrote: post #17

Maybe, but the heat added to earth has to be radiated away from earth. We have never added energy from matter at this scale before. Same for fusion.

THIS! People seem to forget basic physics sometimes. Any source of free, unlimited "clean" energy would be an environmental catastrophe because energy used is released into the atmosphere as heat. We need sources that *capture* energy already in the environment, like solar, wind and similar.

Silent downvotes do very little.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#104

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

zokier wrote: post #74
zerodensity wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out. It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact…

> It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else.

That’s not how things work. It’s tempting to view money in such simple term but also very wrong. In effect, the state has a lot of leeway in how it decides to invest and a lot of conservative positions are taken to preserve the overall status quo when it comes to who has power and who hasn’t.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#105

Post by elsonrodriguez »

ponorin wrote: post #70
ajuc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the exclusion zone of fukushima hasn't changed since the beginning even after 10+ years. same for pripyat and chernobyl, those already close to 40 years. UK had to test sheep for radioactivity in certain domestic areas up until 2012. nuclear damages aren't just dead humans. they come in the forms of lost lands and untrustable food source.

I’d wager the amount of livable and arable land we’ll lose due to continued fossil fuel usage would be greater than having a Fukushima every year.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#106

Post by acidburnNSA »

Nuclear engineer here. I did a similar write-up (gratuitously leveraging GNU Units) since most people don't seem to know this fact about fission breeder reactors. I added some other references at the bottom of people pointing this out throughout nuclear fission's history.

https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#107

Post by jvanderbot »

backtoyoujim wrote: post #100

The space to keep exhausted fission fuel is not.

It's quite a lot less space than you think. There's a giant dump outside Denver international airport that is orders of magnitude larger than we'd need. There are of course other factors, but space is not one of them.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#109

Post by krupan »

ponorin wrote: post #70
ajuc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the exclusion zone of fukushima hasn't changed since the beginning even after 10+ years. same for pripyat and chernobyl, those already close to 40 years. UK had to test sheep for radioactivity in certain domestic areas up until 2012. nuclear damages aren't just dead humans. they come in the forms of lost lands and untrustable food source.

How big are the areas that solar farms cover compared to that exclusion zone?

How big will the exclusion zones of Climate Change be if we keep burning fossil fuels?

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#110

Post by ianburrell »

zokier wrote: post #67
IggleSniggle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Lost" means spent towards nobody's useful purpose. Nobody used the output in any way. In transportation, you used your car to get from point A to point B. You don't care about the heat or noise or whatever that you generated. That energy was "lost." If somebody harvested that same energy directly from your vehicle for some purpose, like making fried eggs on your engine block, then the portion used to fry your egg wo…

That just seems either an impossible, or just useless measurement. I guess for industries like aluminum smelting you can say the product captures significant part of the energy put into the process, but most human activities are not like that. For example machining/casting that raw aluminum stock into some intricate product, all the energy ends up as waste because from physics point of view that intricate object does…

The important question is how much energy do they need to put in to get the result. The goal can be machined aluminum or car at destination. For lots of processes, the output energy, like moving car or shining light, is important and the goal. Higher efficiency means can put in less energy and get the same result.

Light ends up as heat, but LEDs are more efficient cause they don’t produce extra heat. Electric motors are more efficient than combustion ones so electric cars end up going farther for same input.

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