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Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

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Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#261

Post by pyrale »

cycomanic wrote: post #251
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…

Except for the fact that french nuclear power is highly subsidized (partly by military budgets, partly other subsidies, partly by grossly underfunding for storage and decommissioning costs, which they are required to put funds aside for), is breaking at the seams last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance (picked up by "intermittent solar and wind").

> last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance

Oh, so low? I heard it was 102%, and we had to activate the hamster wheels in order to make up for the deficit?

Hint: Nuclear isn't even 80% of France's nuclear production when every reactor is up.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#262

Post by pfdietz »

coryrc wrote: post #206
zokier wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Germany pumped a lot into solar a decade or so ago in order to drive solar down its experience curve. This was expensive, but it was a tremendous gift to the world. You can thank much of the game-changing decline in renewable prices on this sacrifice. If they wanted to buy that same capacity again it would be much cheaper now.

The good experience effects of renewables and storage implies we should go full speed ahead installing them. The side effect of pushing down their prices makes this the most cost effective approach overall. Nuclear, which doesn't have good experience effects, is a different story entirely.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#263

Post by bscphil »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #12

The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc. Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil. Important to note that the image is…

> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven.

This does not appear to be correct. The 2018 chart shows a total energy generation of 101.2 quads. The 2021 chart shows only 97.3 quads, a reduction.

The nuclear fraction of total energy generation in 2018 was 0.0834; in 2021 this became 0.0836, a slight increase in its proportion of US energy generation!

Moreover, it's astonishing that in 2021 the US while operating only 55 nuclear power plants generated more energy with those plants than all the energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal combined. Given the sheer number of solar and wind farms I see almost everywhere I go these days, it's really not great that they generate such a small portion of our energy needs.

My understanding is that this situation will just get worse as we try to scale up wind and solar, as well, since it's much more difficult to supply base load with unpredictable power sources.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#264

Post by pfdietz »

roenxi wrote: post #55
brazzy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could very, very easily kill a thousand times more. That we haven't seen anything like a worst case scenario for a unclear accident does not mean those are impossible.

What do you think that worst case is, and how are you estimating it?

This whole thread is about breeder reactors. The worst case (for a fast reactor) is the reactor rearranging in a meltdown and going prompt fast supercritical, resulting in a honest-to-god nuclear explosion. And remember a fast breeder is going to have tonnes of plutonium in that core, not the kilograms of a fission weapon.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#265

Post by yellowapple »

krupan wrote: post #109
ponorin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the exclusion zone of fukushima hasn't changed since the beginning even after 10+ years. same for pripyat and chernobyl, those already close to 40 years. UK had to test sheep for radioactivity in certain domestic areas up until 2012. nuclear damages aren't just dead humans. they come in the forms of lost lands and untrustable food source.

How big are the areas that solar farms cover compared to that exclusion zone? How big will the exclusion zones of Climate Change be if we keep burning fossil fuels?

Out of curiosity, I decided to do some napkin math on this.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant produced 4.7GWe when it was operational, and its current exclusion zone covers an area of 230 square miles - or 0.0204 GW/mi^2.

The US has (according to https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...) 102.9GWe of solar capacity covering an area of 965 square miles - or 0.1GW/mi^2.

Judging by that, a nuclear disaster's exclusion zone is worse than that of a "solar disaster" (so to speak).

However, the Fukushima plant itself occupies 1.34375 square miles - putting its normal-operation figure at 3.498 GW/mi^2. That's considerably better than the land area occupied by a Fukushima-equivalent solar installation. The question, therefore, is whether a better worst-case figure for land destruction justifies a substantially-worse best-case figure; I don't think it does, but I understand that not everyone would agree.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#266

Post by pyrale »

Kon5ole wrote: post #250
pyrale wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed. I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources. Actual serious sources [1] report funding is being set aside for dismantling, which may be significantly eased by the fact that these reactor are actually going to serve for longer than expected. [1], in french: https://…

>>> And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed. >I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources. We know for a fact that France nationalized EDF last year and the debt is at currently 65 bn euros and growing. Since the company has been nationalized, the taxpayers are on the hook. I wouldn't personally go so far a…

The debt doesn't come from unit costs, EDF has been profitable for decades with the current rates.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#267

Post by pfdietz »

himinlomax wrote: post #9
LatteLazy wrote: post #2

Expensive though.

Solar panels are cheaper. They're also useless at night or in winter at higher latitude. The question is not whether it's expensive, the question is whether it's worth the price.

We're close to, or even at, the point where hydrogen made with solar, then burned in combined cycle power plants, produces power more cheaply than nuclear. Of course, in a renewable energy system, only a fraction of the energy has to go through hydrogen; much will be consumed directly from the grid (or through short term storage.)

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#268

Post by philipkglass »

cyrillite wrote: post #228

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?

The vast majority of new reactors built each year are still light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel. There's a smaller but notable fleet of power reactors of the pressurized heavy water type. Everything else is a rounding error.

My newest nuclear engineering textbook is from 1983 [1] and it's still fine because in the last 40 years very little has changed at a high level. In online discussions you'll see a lot of excitement about other kinds of reactors (molten salt reactors, gas cooled, metal cooled, pebble bed, breeders, etc.) and this older textbook mentions all those kinds of reactors too. But if you want to understand what the nuclear industry actually builds and operates, a used textbook from the 1980s or later will be fine.

[1] Introduction to Nuclear Engineering 2nd Edition by John LaMarsh.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#269

Post by yawaramin »

Zigurd wrote: post #231
yawaramin wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that's your only response to all my points, then I think we're done here.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#270

Post by yawaramin »

skissane wrote: post #242
yawaramin wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given an exajoule and a quad are close in value, you’d get roughly the same result with exajoules instead. Also, the fact that total US energy consumption is currently roughly 100 quads is only a passing coincidence - it would not have been true in the past and will not be true in the future. It is weird to justify choice of unit on the basis of a temporary coincidence in the data

The post is about a specific point in time, not for all time. So there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of a temporary alignment in the data.
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