Absolutely false premise from the first sentence. It is NOT possible for the world to live like the first world did in the 20th century. And nuclear energy is an apocalypically short-sited solution, mostly favored by the current energy industry for maintaining the current model of distribution.
Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
201–210 of 371 posts
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Well according to the two graphgs for 2018 and 2019, nuclear declined a bit in the US. Not surprising because there were some plant closures and not a whole lot of plant openings. And nothing is on track to be added any time soon. Maybe one or two plants. New nuclear is a bit like an oil tanker (pun intended, sorry): just very slow to ramp up new capacity. This boom you are talking about is so far not adding up to a…
Solar capacity factor is typically between 10-25%, so "tens of GWs" doesn't go nearly as far.
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch for each plant. Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors, then hand coding pro…
> The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design Wikipedia has a list of nuclear reactors in France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran... According to the list, most power plants came online in the 1980s, so it doesn't sound like they "keep building" more of them. The most recent ones, Civaux and Chooz-B, came online in 2000. Flamanville appears to be incorrectly sta…
>As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.)
I think many of the people who aren't anti-nuclear, would agree with all that.
>However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables.
I rarely see that here. What I tend to see are people who don't like the idea of nuclear power making misleading or false statements about nuclear power. (Like in the original message of this thread where the claim is made "After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor.")
>My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc.
This statement is true in one small sense and misleading in another. You are likely providing excess power during a sunny day in the summer and less power than you are using when it rains and you are providing no power at other times (like at 2:00 AM.). While at the end of the year you might produce more kilowatts than you in total used, that isn't going to help your neighbors when it is raining. The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created and consequently has to be heavily subsidized by your neighbors who don't have rooftop solar.
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#204After 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.
The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch for each plant. Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors, then hand coding pro…
You'd be better using South Korea as an example rather than France these days. To add more context, South Korea is an incredibly, incredibly corrupt country that sends its exiting president to prison to the extent that I joke that we need a special prison just for presidents. Yet there are basically no nuclear accidents at the kind of scale that we saw from Japan. 100% speculating but it's almost as if the nuclear power plants are used as a deterrent and part of the national security apparatus perhaps similar to the logic that Ukraine may have had in the past.
The anti-nuclear crusade in the West is a bit worrisome given that if we had been better at dealing with nuclear as a whole there would be less coal and gas power plants all over the West now. As much as I can sympathize with the concerns about nuclear power related supply chain issues and risks of meltdowns + radiation almost all the problems I've seen in nuclear across countries and cultures don't come down to technical issues as much as structural ones due 90%+ to politics causing massive over-regulation of nuclear to become unviable both financially and politically. This seems silly because I strongly believe such efforts should be directed at the much greater, immediate, far more supportable threat to humanity's IMO of fossil fuels. Of course we kind of depend upon them now but given the problems we had from the 1980s into the 2000s with fossil fuels all the way to now the kind of resources we could have spent on renewables may have had better results simply stepping away from lobbying constantly against nuclear power and letting engineers do their best work in all areas of energy research.
Seriously, almost all the "but nuclear costs too much" arguments are a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad faith where people pile on more and more requirements like it's a really bad DoD project when it's much more complicated honestly. US DoD has operated tons and tons of nuclear reactors, for example, quite successfully with a pretty darn good safety record last I saw despite all sorts of other failures within the US Jobs Program - they're used in submarines!
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#205All 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…
> and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist This is certainly wrong, unless the word "definitive" is used to shift the goal post such that it's effectively impossible to meet. Like the people who said, of Yucca Mountain, that "sure, it's been geologically stable for millions of years, but we can't definitively say there won't be an earthquake tomorrow", or "what if society collapses and, ten thousand years from…
At a minimum definitive must mean from today and until we can and will make any radioactive waste not radioactive waste anymore. If that requires safety against stone age explores or not I can't say. History has an abundance of tales of how we store things safe enough and then decades (or a few years) later we learn that dumping thousands of barrels of radioactive waste in the ocean was stupid, that slapping some concrete on top of a nuclear bomb test site didn't really contain it, that mixing chemical waste with earth and letting it sit near a river was pretty stupid, etc. etc.
Definitive means it is 100% certain this is not happening with any radioactive waste as there's no lower limit where radiation isn't dangerous. "Definitely safe against human stupidity and error" seems fine to me for radioactive waste when there's zero need to produce any. Again, is that timescale up until stone age man in the future? I can't say but the producers of radioactive waste need to know the answer before they can built a storage facility or they'll have to make it safe enough for anything less than the earth going pooof.
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#206Earlier 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…
Germany disproves this being a good idea. Incredible amounts invested in solar yet still wholly dependent on coal and natural gas to survive the winter.
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chernobyl was a perfect storm of bad design, political corruption, and reckless behavior. No Western nuclear plant has ever run without a containment dome, has excluded basic plant design info from its operators, or put in incentives to run a reckless spin down experiment while also cutting all cooling and raising all control rods. Three Mile Island was close to worst possible in a Western design, and those aspects t…
Renewables capex already outstrips fossil fuels. Complete that transition and get all the power we need for less money, sooner, and you can buy private insurance at low rates to cover any risks.
How well do solar and wind infrastructures handle tornados and hurricanes? Also, consistent wind resources are notably absent in the South/Southeast. There are no Hoover Dam-like sites available there. Do you honestly expect to tell tens of millions of people that they should just be content with a single hurricane knocking out their electricity grid for a month? That's not realistic.
You cannot plan an electrical future on the hope that the weather is always pleasant and consistent. This is one of the reasons why fossil fuel dominance continues in those regions. Go ahead and draw a map of those places where hurricanes and tornados are most prevalent and their large scale adoption of solar and wind. They're not stupid. They're not just political. There are real concerns you are handwaving away because you (likely) like in a region that does not have these same concerns.
What works for California will not work for Georgia, Florida, or Nebraska as-is. Baseball-size hail destroys huge solar arrays let alone softball-size [0]. Nuclear plants laugh at hail and would handle and have(!) weathered tornados and hurricanes just fine.
Check the numbers. Even accounting for nuclear disasters outside the US like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the number of deaths attributed to nuclear power per unit of electricity is lower than any fossil fuel, lower than wind, and about equal to solar. Just imagine if we put the same R&D force behind nuclear that we've done for solar. You think solar's cheap? It wasn't ten years ago. It was intense investment that made it so. We have the same potential for nuclear.
At the very least, we should be aggressively working toward fast neutron reactors so that we don't have spent fuel that will remain dangerously radioactive for 100,000+ years. We can "burn" that "waste" and supply the entire current need for US electrical production for the next 150 years without mining a single new kilogram of uranium [1].
[0] https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-...
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#208> Many different units are used to discuss large quantities of energy. The graph above uses “quads”, or quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units. The SI unit of energy is the joule, and a comparable quantity is the exajoule (EJ), Why use “quads” instead of exajoules? I really don’t understand the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well t…
It's explained in the post. It makes the total amount be roughly 100 quads, which makes it easy to estimate all the numbers in the graphic as percentages.
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nuclear technology is safe enough "enough" is a point of view, is your, so ok for you, not enough for me. Fukushima was not enough safe, but again, for me. And there are many others "not enough" situations others than 3 famous. > storage of the waste is non-issue.. To me, is not a volumetric problem, but for time ad long term safety. At fukushima disposing of the contaminated water is still a big problem now, imagi…
Efficiency of solar and wind isn't the real issue. The problem is: solar only works during a day, and wind farms only work when there's wind. Which makes both of them irregular, unpredictable. It could be mitigated if we had a cheap mass energy storage technology, but we don't (Li-Ion batteries are way too expensive, and hydroelectric storage requires very specific conditions, it cannot be built just anywhere). What…
If the storage facility is absolute safe against nature and current and future human stupidity and curiosity, yes.
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#210Earlier 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.
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 lo…
Fukushima direct cleanup costs are $15B: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/10/after-fiv...
$60B in refugee compensation.
And $200B because they stopped using nuclear for a while as an overreaction.
Oh, and the tsunami+earthquake cost over $250B independent of the nuclear accident.
Your number is FUD.