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Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

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Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#231

Post by Zigurd »

yawaramin wrote: post #215
Zigurd wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 up…

Nothing about renewables is speculative. Renewables build-out is the largest share of energy capex. If renewables were "destroying many species" it would be all over the news. The 1980s called and wants their "solar will never..." argument back.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#232

Post by rewmie »

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…

> (...) consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created (...)

Care to show the basis of your personal assertion? It's an extraordinary and unbelievable claim.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#233

Post by effed3 »

Detrytus wrote: post #199
effed3 wrote: post #161

Earlier 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…

Yes, efficiency is not an issue, but is improving.

Storage technology evolve, there are many battery technology, even better than li-ion if fully developed, and storage can be chemical, capturing co2 and making fuels with net zero CO2 pollution, can be thermal, can be even gravitational, hydrogen local storage, and energy can move in grids, to go where is need from where is available, engineering can do this now it there is a true will.

If there is a system finely distributed (many systems) for production, transport and storage, in a mix on low to high tecnology, this will make global energy really available and independent of uncertains and variable conditions.

Many examples of good offgrid appication exist, done by some guys, Imagine what can be done with true development/investment just tomorrow.

And Uranium (like fossil fuels) is not everywhere, a shift of geopolitics will affect availability, sun and wind are everywhere, maybe not constant, but hardly vanish for long periods everywhere..

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#234

Post by antonvs »

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…

The comparison being discussed in the article I linked is with clean energy alternatives. In that respect, nuclear does need significantly more safety measures than wind or solar, for example.

The problem with nuclear is that it's much more difficult to regulate effectively than most other industries, because the consequences of mistakes can be so much higher. E.g. Chernobyl contaminated food throughout much of Europe for months. The natural organizational reaction in that situation is to overcompensate.

Nuclear is likely to always be expensive for that reason, because you're never going to get economy of scale as long as companies can't e.g. mass produce nuclear plants and set them up all over the place. I also generally agree with the other reply to your comment by three14.

I consider this to be a pragmatic observation, not a judgment on whether nuclear might make sense in some hypothetical perfectly rational world.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#235

Post by fnordpiglet »

p1mrx wrote: post #217
fnordpiglet wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

Right but it’s not a maximizing theoretical loss function, it’s picking a specific expenditure of energy as the goal - kinetic energy of the bit. Particularly you don’t know the goal of the bits motion, and the work the energy does could translate into the machined parts final configuration or something else. The goal isn’t specially to account for energy in some full final system but to give an optimization function for the tool itself to maximize. You’re looking at it from a physics point of view rather than an engineering point of view, the engineering view is practical - how much energy is expended to get a certain amount of work done by the bit and not doing other stuff like heating the environment, making noises, inducing vibration. The metric is a practical one, and it’s never meant to capture the entire energy transfer dynamic in a physics sense.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#236

Post by IggleSniggle »

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…

It's not about energy capture. It's about energy being used to accomplish useful work vs energy expelled towards non-productive ends. And I fail to see how this is a useless measurement of energy consumption when it's the entire reason we harness energy beyond what we can consume by eating.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#237

Post by effed3 »

bob1029 wrote: post #120
effed3 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal. Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10 years ago this was unthinkable. This appear the true way of prosperity, not the growt of availability/consump…

> This is the right question/goal. No. I have seen the effects of this "goal" at scale in my personal life. Semi-non-effective HVAC systems that I now have to run 24/7/365, LED lights with weird flicker that perpetually antagonize me everywhere , vehicles with obnoxious start/stop mechanisms that absolutely induce premature wear (causing much more serious waste than otherwise). Oh yeah - my washing machine doesn't re…

i solidarize with you about the madnees of this "over-everything", but maybe marketing department at the higher floors are to blame, more than environmentalist, usually they are not sitting in the executive boards...

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#239

Post by pyrale »

PaulHoule wrote: post #221
pyrale wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yes, some of the older generations also got exported around. There's one in South Africa too IIRC, based on CP1 reactors.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#240

Post by throwaway5959 »

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…

Why does it seem we can’t build complicated things like we used to? The same seems to be true here in the US as well.
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