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Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

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Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#121

Post by uoaei »

dang wrote: post #113
uoaei wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Hellish flamewar is not ok on this site, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. Your comments stand out in this flamewar as being distinctly the most hellish. Not only that, you've broken the site guidelines so egregiously elsewhere (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36744128 ) that I think we have to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombina…

I appreciate your eternal level-headedness and poise. I need checks as much as anyone. I won't disparage HN's community; I have become sour to the image of tech-oriented rationalists vs the reality and am projecting expectations onto Toms, Dicks, and Nancys. My weight to bear of course.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#122

Post by throwaway1777 »

Gwypaas wrote: post #118

After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder. It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.

Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#123

Post by p1mrx »

effed3 wrote: post #94
rayiner wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use Energy efficiency improvements of that magnitude don’t exist. In most industries, getting a 10% efficiency improvement would be groundbreaking. These are limits dictated by physics.

True, an overall 10% improvement is a big number, one order of magnitude is SF now. But for single technologies, more than 10% is possible, internal combustion engines vs electric, incandescent light vs led.. So reasoning on the global efficiency (resource and energy use, recycling of materials, capture of wasted energy, ) is the mainline to go. IN nature photosynthesis is around 100% efficient.

> photosynthesis is around 100% efficient.

It's closer to 2% efficient:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency#Plan...

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#124

Post by acidburnNSA »

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.

See other replies above. Thermal energy emissions pale in utter insignificance compared to the solar heat flux. What matters is things that control what happens with that solar heat flux, aka greenhouse gasses.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#125

Post by acidburnNSA »

effed3 wrote: post #51

All the analysis like this forget to count the cost of decommissioning the nuclear technology, reactors and fuels. Cost for end of life reactors are an order of magnitude those of contruction, and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist, both payed by -public-. The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact are to count in, not easy to…

Decomissioning is factored into all nuclear lifecycle analyses. Long term waste solutions are in operation today (see WIPP) and expanding soon (see Onkalo).

https://whataboutthewaste.com

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#126

Post by gs17 »

abecedarius wrote: post #79
peteradio wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you repair a sun? It would seem to defy some entropy laws but what do I know?

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

I forgot what that term meant, and was imagining carefully swapping the sun with a different, younger, star.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#127

Post by monkaiju »

Gwypaas wrote: post #118

After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder. It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.

People also dont like to mention that even the current, far from 'green', extraction is because we currently only mine the easiest to access deposits of uranium. There are not many of these and we would shortly need to start accessing much more challenging (read: dirty) deposits were we to scale nuclear.

Also of the handful of breeder reactors we have (i think the only 2 running are in Russia) they are incredibly far from economical and have a really annoying tendency to catch fire...

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#128

Post by ben_w »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #122
Gwypaas wrote: post #118

After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder. It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.

Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste

Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we want regardless within each national power grid.

People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#129

Post by zokier »

ianburrell wrote: post #110
zokier wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, it is reasoably easy to say that A is more efficient than B, and even quantify how much energy A saves in comparison to B. But that is only a relative measure; it is far less obvious how you'd quantify the waste in absolute terms like the chart in question here seems to do? To do so you'd need to know some theoretical ideal minimum energy process that would get some equivalent end result as a reference point, but that seems wildly infeasible to estimate

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#130

Post by Joeri »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #122
Gwypaas wrote: post #118

After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder. It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.

Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste

China and Russia do not build and run nuclear power plants at dramatically lower costs, despite having none of those handicaps.

Edit: Hmm, actually, I find wildly diverging LCOE numbers in different locations online. Some indicate they build at half the cost from France, while others say at a similar cost. So, if anyone knows which LCOE numbers are reliable please indicate.

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