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Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

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Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#21

Post by Kon5ole »

baq wrote: post #5
Kon5ole wrote: post #3

Are the costs of this 13 years and counting expense tab added to the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power plants in any way? Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions are not made from overly optimistic numbers.

Money is numbers in computers, joules and watts are real things. Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.

Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do. This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#22

Post by pyrale »

Kon5ole wrote: post #3

Are the costs of this 13 years and counting expense tab added to the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power plants in any way? Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions are not made from overly optimistic numbers.

I would be curious to know which industry would survive such drastic standards.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#23

Post by pyrale »

Kon5ole wrote: post #21
baq wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is numbers in computers, joules and watts are real things. Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.

Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do. This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.

Negative industrial byproducts creating costs for future generations is an unique challenge? Have you heard of climate change?

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#24

Post by philipkglass »

atomic128 wrote: post #20
baq wrote: post #2

> “With the goal of completing the decommissioning in 30 to 40 years [...]" Can't decide if it's a success of nuclear or a failure. Leaning towards success: - ~900 tons of super duper radioactive material is more or less safely sitting in steel enclosures - we're (as a global civilization) slowly but surely figuring out how to move the hazardous waste to a safer storage, and it may only (ahem) take a couple generatio…

The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy. The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere. The "Great East Japan Earthquake" and its tsunami killed 19,759 people. The…

The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy.

This precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very hot ("decay heat").

Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium, generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until several decades have passed.

It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is vastly higher, the heat generation complicates handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it and start with fresh material.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#25

Post by jajko »

fsh wrote: post #10
Filligree wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the existence of coal power proves that releasing small amounts of radiation is fine, really. So we should be able to build a lot more nuclear power plants; it would take a lot of accidents like these to match the releases from coal.

The explosion of Chernobyl released a few thousand PBq of activity. Coal contains a few tens to a few hundreds of Bq/kg. You would have to burn something like 50 times the world coal reserves (and make sure not to use any exhaust filters) in order to match the radiation release of Chernobyl.

While I like nuclear on the paper and its theoretical env impact, this one is hard to ignore. Add costs of current projects which became ridiculous in reality. Plus as we see with various wars nuclear powerplants would be a prime target for terrorists or even state actors, they are certainly not considered as excluded from wars, in contrary.

If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0 reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere, apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of renewables technology maturity and its spread.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#26

Post by Scarblac »

Krasnol wrote: post #19
baq wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-nuclear movement succeeded in Germany and they’re reaping the crops now. Nobody will go back to 1800s quality of life willingly if they can help it, be it by burning coal, trash, plastics, tires or paint cans for heat or electricity.

Oh, sure they are reaping. 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely. The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible innovation…

61.5% sounds like a lot, but how much electricity is needed to replace everything that fossil fuel is now used for? I think it needs to increase to 400% or so to do that.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#27

Post by bell-cot »

Kon5ole wrote: post #21
baq wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is numbers in computers, joules and watts are real things. Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.

Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do. This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.

> ...centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what...

OR, you put the nasty and long-lived radwaste into (say) lead barrels, and bury those below some nice, deep, easily-monitored ocean trench. Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up. And if the effort needed to intentionally do so would be greater than the effort to brew their own fresh radwaste, then nobody will bother trying that, either.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#28

Post by Zigurd »

Kon5ole wrote: post #3

Are the costs of this 13 years and counting expense tab added to the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power plants in any way? Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions are not made from overly optimistic numbers.

If you think Hollywood accounting is opaque and full of shenanigans, look into electric utilities. Nuclear power is not conventionally insurable. The NRC has the most understandable explainer I have found here: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...

The current fad of buying old nukes to power data centers is going to be a learning experience for the tech industry about taking on the liabilities entailed.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#29

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Krasnol wrote: post #19
baq wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-nuclear movement succeeded in Germany and they’re reaping the crops now. Nobody will go back to 1800s quality of life willingly if they can help it, be it by burning coal, trash, plastics, tires or paint cans for heat or electricity.

Oh, sure they are reaping. 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely. The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible innovation…

> 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources

Now. For years they switched to coal. Even today, Germany falls to the siren songs of the gas lobby, who promise a €1.5tn investment into gas infrastructure will be happily written off for the sake of the planet.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#30

Post by haconBagrid »

Krasnol wrote: post #19
baq wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-nuclear movement succeeded in Germany and they’re reaping the crops now. Nobody will go back to 1800s quality of life willingly if they can help it, be it by burning coal, trash, plastics, tires or paint cans for heat or electricity.

Oh, sure they are reaping. 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely. The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible innovation…

And here we can see how their electricity generation has fallen

https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

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