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Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

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Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#221

Post by PaulHoule »

pyrale wrote: post #147
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…

> The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. As a french Engineer, I can confirm this. For work inquiries, please reach me at pyrale@oversized.ego > The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design In fact, we don't keep building them. The last N4 reactor was delivered in 2003. Since then, aside from the failed joint-venture with Germany that is the EPR, France ess…

Isn't the Hualong One (both of them!) derived from French designs?

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

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#222

Post by urinotherapist »

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…

> 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

So, you propose to increase number of regulations and total cost of the nuclear energy, right?

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#223

Post by chrisco255 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #192
chrisco255 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the biggest use of petroleum by far is for transportation. Worldwide demand for petroleum would plunge 90+% if all cars were electric and nuclear was fully deployed.

Uh, no. Only two thirds of petroleum used in America is used for transportation, and that includes all transportation. You cannot possibly get a 90+% reduction in petroleum use by electrifying all cars. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

So by that chart, a barrel of oil is basically 89% used to generate gasoline, distillate fuel oil (diesel), hydrocarbon gas, and jet fuel. That is to say, 89% is used for energy and 11% or less is used for plastic, asphault, and materials. That 27% industrial figure on the right chart includes things like propane production, which is mainly used as a heat source (nuclear could absolutely replace this).

Either way, if your economy is dependent on oil exports, whether you were to lose 2/3 of that or 9/10 of that business, you're going to be hurting, and you might not rush to refactor your economy around nuclear.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#224

Post by danhor »

joecool1029 wrote: post #101
jillesvangurp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Wasn't the issue with Texas that renewables were behaving as expected (unfortunately not producing a lot of electricity), but fossil fuel power sources were failing unexpectedly due to the freezes? Thus the issue not being renwables.

I'm also surprised at the mention of a coal renaissance in germany. While coal isn't reduced as much as it should, all the data I found pointed to a continual downwards trend over the last years.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#225

Post by cauch »

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…

> 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.")

I think it's just easier to notice "misleading or false statements" when they contradict what we like to think rather than when they are going in the same direction.

For example, are you 200% sure of your sentence "The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created"? Is that true everywhere, all the time? Because if not, how is that not as much as "misleading or false statements" than the original sentence you quote? But of course, this sentence of yours does not strike you as misleading, because you truly believe it's not misleading.

Also, while I don't think the anti-nuclear are less numerous or less idiot, the pro-nuclear usually are also very very prone to think they are smarter when they are not, and start using bullying method to "fight the infidels", which, at least in my circle which are neutral, is really starting to make that side looks bad.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#226

Post by sbierwagen »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #174
epaulson wrote: post #165

Yes, we could get a lot more energy out of our fission fuel. The reason the USA doesn't is because Jimmy Carter set a policy of not reprocessing fuel because he felt it encouraged nuclear weapons proliferation, coming just a few years after India exploded its first device. Carter's statement: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf

Considering that Reagan reversed this policy by unbanning reprocessing in 1981, this isn't the only reason we don't do it today. Other reasons include that reprocessing is expensive and that we found a lot more uranium ore than originally expected. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf

The Indian test used weapons-grade plutonium produced in the low power CIRUS research reactor, much like how we were making plutonium in 1945. It's thought that Carter banned civilian reprocessing because a nuclear test in 1962 showed that a weapon could even be made from what the DOE described as "reactor-grade" plutonium: https://permanent.access.gpo.gov/websites/osti.gov/www.osti.... https://npolicy.org/greg-jones-americas-1962-reactor-grade-p...

A bomb with an actively cooled pit probably couldn't be miniaturized enough to be MIRVed but it would be compatible with old school single-warhead ICBMs or air delivery.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#227

Post by antonvs »

Keyframe wrote: post #194
antonvs wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an argument against government subsidies, it's just looking at the economic viability of nuclear power relative to other options.

Right. Does it account for positive / negative economic impact of (lack of) pollution?

The goal, alluded to in the quote I provided, is to compare it to cleaner alternatives.

The article I linked ends as follows:

> "For all these reasons, nuclear energy, even though nuclear power is emission-free, is not a relevant solution for profitable, climate-friendly and sustainable energy in the future." According to the researchers, nuclear energy as a solution for climate protection is "an old narrative that is still as inaccurate as in the 1970s."

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#228

Post by cyrillite »

This is brilliantly interesting. However, I lack a taxonomy for understanding nuclear power. What’s outdated, what’s just old, what’s new and promising, what’s just nonsense, and what are the ways we expect to deploy nuclear energy?

Finding reliable and accessible sources is tricky. Does anybody here have a good starting point for a technically minded non-expert outsider?

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#229

Post by three14 »

MostlyStable wrote: post #216
antonvs wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

Not to pick on you, but every time this discussion happens on HN, someone argues that the nuclear power industry is burdened by far more red tape than other industries (probably true) and that if we simply reduce the red tape, we could profitably build new nuclear plants (probably true) and they would still be safe (probably not true). This isn't an engineering problem. This is a social problem. Suppose you offer to let people build with minimal regulation - the most profitable plants are going to be the ones that cut the most corners on safety. The great engineering team that made a safe but slightly more expensive reactor than the minimum allowed by regulation will be out of the market.

And unsafe nuclear is really unsafe in a politically terrible way. You are doomed to either have Chernobyls or a lot of non-optimal regulation, or excellent regulation in the world of spherical cows and frictionless planes.

Perhaps one of the new nuclear startups can find a solution to this, but it'll have to be by finding a way to mass produce nuclear within the existing heavy red tape regime. And in the real world, that's not a bad thing.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#230

Post by pyrale »

Panino wrote: post #184
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…

> 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…

> However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables.

The reverse is pretty much true too. It seems like both renewables and nuclear proponents should be taking turns bashing fossil fuels, but since both see each other as a competitor for "the future of power", that's where the banter goes.

> And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents making widespread demonstrably false statements.

You don't have to go further than this thread to find false statements about nuclear.

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