All the smart people of my generation have spent their time working on burning energy. For AI, crypto, etc. Imagine if they worked as hard on making energy instead.
EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
#472Does EU still buy fissile fuel from Russia?
Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
The (authoritarian?) nation of Finland has already solved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... I watched a very interesting documentary about Onkalo, which happens to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
Last I read Onkalo was testing empty casks and had stored zero waste for zero years. Bit of a rush to close the GitHub ticket eh?
True, they haven’t stored any waste yet but the facility is completed.
And depending on how you look at it, it could be 100,000 years before you know for sure if it works, so my claim that it’s a ‘solved problem’ is a bit strong. I’ll retract that and say that it’s the most promising idea for nuclear waste disposal, one that that is close to beginning operations.
Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with that, renewables are cheaper. One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
You should check out these things called batteries.
Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries. So yeah. Regulation. Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident…
And then there's coal. The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills fewer people than coal kills as part of its normal expected operation.
The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills as many people right here and makes as much land uninhabitable right here as coal does in our enemy countries within its normal expected operation.
Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
#476I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear.
People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?
Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries. So yeah. Regulation. Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident…
I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all. So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.
It was perfectly fine because the operators stole the batteries from all the cars in the parking lot to run the control room. Not something I'd like the continued existence of New York City to rely upon.
Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries. So yeah. Regulation. Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident…
I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all. So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.
The costs of cleaning up Fukushima, including the wider effects on the Japanese economy, are estimated to exceed US$200 billion. That makes it a pretty EPIC disaster in economic terms alone.
Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.
Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy n…
> which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments…
> Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power.
But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.
> It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems
These things should all costs thousands of dollars, not billions of dollars.
> loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
These are operating costs rather than construction costs and are already accounted for in the comparison of fuel costs.
> Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant. We both know which one costs more -- and highways themselves cost more than they should because the government overpays for everything.
> Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway.
Is this actually a problem? It's not a truck full of gamma emitters, it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source. Isn't this solvable with a lead-lined box?
> Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
Have taxpayers actually paid anything here at all? The power plants have paid more in premiums than they've ever filed in claims, haven't they?
> You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day. You could hypothetically build a single wind turbine that shorts out and starts a massive wildfire.
Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
#480The problem with all kinds of "green" movements and such is that they only _demand_ solutions without being involved. That also means they might have very little idea if their premise is even valid, they just put all their energy towards organization, making signs n stuff and are very emotion-driven.
People thinking fission reactors might randomly explode like nuclear bombs Simpsons-style and so many green parties in Europe being anti-nuclear has held progress back too much. Minimal climate activism isn't bad, but they really bit hard in to the fork on this one.