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Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

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Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#211

Post by ttfkam »

Dah00n wrote: post #196
ttfkam wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure the cleanup costs for continued use of coal, oil, and natural gas due to global climate change far exceed any from nuclear, including even Chernobyl. Entire nations are disappearing under the rising seas [0]. So far they are relatively poor and lack political influence. Bangladesh is soon for the chopping block. Louisiana and Florida are not far behind. Folks really don't get how close to sea level massiv…

Nuclear competes with renewables going forward.

Not until fossil fuels are eliminated for all practical purposes. The only real competition we have today is against global climate change. Once we get past that hump, we can quibble about non-carbon-emitting details.

As long as coal, oil, and natural gas are burned and released into the atmosphere, the economic "competition" going forward is illusory. We're just buying the mitigation and cleanup efforts on credit.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#212

Post by yawaramin »

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…

If you apply this logic universally then we basically can't have a modern human civilization, because airplanes, steelmaking, chemical manufacturing, and many other heavy industrial applications will also be considered too dangerous. This is exactly tackled in the post:

> Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#213

Post by bobsmooth »

Dah00n wrote: post #205
karaterobot wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 con…

>until we can and will make any radioactive waste not radioactive waste anymore

Nature does that for us. It's why burying is a perfectly acceptable means of disposal.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#214

Post by Dah00n »

willis936 wrote: post #34
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The technical challenges of storage can be hand waved away, but not if you want to actually solve the problems.

Now it fits nuclear too.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#215

Post by yawaramin »

Zigurd wrote: post #142
elsonrodriguez wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is an interesting argument and let's stipulate it is correct. In that case, take all the oil capex and spend it on power sources that are least costly, least risky, and come on line fastest. Who thinks nuclear is least costly, least risky, and arrives soonest? Anyone? Bueller?

The problem with those power sources–and this has been pointed out many, many times–is they don't make reliable base load power. The sun doesn't shine at night–no solar power. Winds don't blow on calm days–no wind power.

You are forced to build massive battery farms. Batteries require mining chemicals. For the scale we are talking about, you would be strip-mining the earth.

You are forced to make incredibly costly upgrades to electric grids–some of which are nearly a century old. Because the current grids can't handle the unreliable, wax-and-wane nature of solar and wind power.

You are forced to build gigantic solar panel and wind farms, destroying vast swathes of natural ecology and displacing and destroying many species.

You are forced to deal with solar panels and wind turbines at the end of life problem, especially solar panels which contain toxic chemicals which are at risk of leaching into the environment (think 'water table') unless they are properly disposed of. No one has a viable plan for proper disposal of solar panels at the scale we would have to be talking about.

And finally–the elephant in the room. The giant energy corporations just won't transition to renewable energy if they don't get a high-enough return on their investments. They want something like 12% ROI. This is extremely unlikely. They've left all their commitments to go renewable conditional so they can weasel out by saying it's not cost-effective for them. Just look at what's happening in reality: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/23/siemens-energy-scraps-profit...

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#216

Post by MostlyStable »

antonvs wrote: post #158
hedora wrote: post #131

Earlier 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…

According to https://www.ad.nl/economie/duur-en-gevaarlijk-elke-kerncentr... (translated with Google): > "The leading German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin investigated whether new nuclear power plants can indeed contribute to a clean(er) economy. The answer is negative: all 674 nuclear power plants that were built worldwide between 1951 and 2017 were built with substantial government subsidies. With…

Do those cost estimates include the absolutely insane over-engineering for safety that has been forced on the nuclear power industry and _only_ the nuclear power industry? I'd be shocked if a single other power generation method didn't double in price if it was forced to meet the same standards as nuclear. I guarantee you that the coal plants in Germany are killing more people every year than every single one of their Nuclear plants has combined over it's lifetime. And likely more than every single nuclear plant on the planet with the possible exception of Chernobyl

To be clear, I'm not saying there should be no regulations, and that just anyone should be able to build any kind of reactor they want anywhere they want with no concerns for safety etc. But I do _very much think_ that when you are considering a technology that increases safety and also increases cost, you have to consider what the alternatives are. Are _they_ safer than whatever the current thing is? If you force it to be more expensive and more safe, are you going to get less of it and instead get the other, cheaper, more dangerous thing?

That calculation has never been done (in the US at least) and the result is thousands to millions dead over the past 80ish years a result of continuing to burn coal instead of nuclear.

The US nuclear safety regime (which is what makes it so expensive and so impractical) has no concept of tradeoffs. It imagines a hypothetical perfect power generation that never kills anyone to which nuclear should be held. That standard is ridiculous now and was ridiculous 50 years ago when nuclear was _already safer than coal_.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#217

Post by p1mrx »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #138
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…

In your example of machining the useful energy consumed was in the kinetic energy transferred by the motor into the bit. The noise and heat and other forms of energy dissipation that didn’t go directly into machining the object were wasted or lost. If your goal is the machined part, any energy that wasn’t directly necessary or if it’s expenditure were zero and the part would have been machined identically, is conside…

> the useful energy consumed was in the kinetic energy transferred by the motor into the bit.

This doesn't solve the problem, because the final machined part is not moving, and thus has no kinetic energy.

In order to get an efficiency number, we would have to know what 100% means. Maybe it's possible to calculate the minimum energy required to break the chemical bonds spanning a given cross sectional area of solid aluminum?

I imagine that you could (very theoretically) recover this energy by cold welding the aluminum back together a vacuum.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#218

Post by godelski »

opo wrote: post #203
Panino wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 makin…

A problem with both nuclear-bros as well as anti-nuclear folks is that they tend to get their information through armchair experts who oversimplify extremely complex topics. Neither group tends to understand the real reasons for costs, the risks and dangers of technologies (including other than nuclear, for proper comparisons), or even the complexities of simply emissions which is far more than electricity and transportation and includes daily and seasonal fluxuations across an extremely non-homogeneous landscape.

FWIW, the IPCC advocates for a diversified portfolio which includes nuclear, and this is the general stance of most climate and energy researchers as the simplified version of reasoning (I know, ironic) is "don't take it off the table." When to use it, how much, and where is more controversial, but this gets extremely complicated quite quickly. It's rather problematic when the people disseminating information (i.e. science communicators; both on youtube as well as news) are not actively aligned with scientific consensus.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#219

Post by Zigurd »

ttfkam wrote: post #207
Zigurd wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

Renewable power sources have risks. Renewable power operators can buy insurance against those risks. Can nuclear plant operators buy insurance against nuclear risks? Or are taxpayers on the hook for that?

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#220

Post by acidburnNSA »

VonGuard wrote: post #146

One thing this doesn't really address is that the way you separate plutonium from uranium is via acid. At the end of the process, you have a barrel of radioactive acid to deal with. Not nice stuff to handle. Toxic AND corrosive waste.

The pyrometallurgical methods of separation are a bit nicer. Way less liquid waste than Gen 1 WW2-era separations like PUREX.

https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6...

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