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Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

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Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#511

Post by bethekidyouwant »

awesome_dude wrote: post #471
Mawr wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick... I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die". It's conc…

Until we find the Rosetta stone hieroglyphs were unintelligible, and that language only stopped being used 2000 years ago.

I guess they won’t have Geiger counters in the future

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#512

Post by selimthegrim »

cloudie78 wrote: post #288
dukoid wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show us just a single NPP that is properly insured

Slovenia - Krško nuclear power plant. I leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.

You mean the one Croatia was supposed to be on the hook for half of?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#513

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #469
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.

That overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built.

> That overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built

No, it can’t. We’re already building solar as fast as we can, the economics drive that. The marginal supply will come from something else. That margin is what we’re talking about, not the bulk. Most of the new energy will come from solar. But we can’t manufacture and install PVs quickly enough, particularly over the next 20 years, to close the gap.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#514

Post by lukan »

leonidasrup wrote: post #483
TheCondor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…

Waste management has been solved problem. "A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository "The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP…

"For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository."

Because apparently no country wants to be the dumpster for the radioactive waste of the others?

I wonder why that is, when it is a solved problem.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#515

Post by Ray20 »

patall wrote: post #300
TheCondor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…

Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.

In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons that will make the widespread use of nuclear energy possible: once your neighbor have built a reactor, you begin to share with them all the risks associated with nuclear energy, but you receive none of the benefits. This makes building a nuclear reactor more attractive to you, since you're already bearing the risks.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#516

Post by lukan »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #487
TheCondor wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too. For the record, this thorium react…

> the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit. The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves b…

"At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think."

Yes, but to be really safe, that point might be so low, it becomes really expensive, also getting it all there without accident - which is the whole point, of course radioactive waste can be treated safe and sound - but that is expensive and people and companies and governments are known to be sloppy.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#517

Post by crote »

koolba wrote: post #329
indoordin0saur wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container. The storage units for this stuff is incredibly…

Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.

[dead]

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#518

Post by lukan »

remarkEon wrote: post #262
TheCondor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…

Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for t…

"We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity"

Did you ever handled radioactive material yourself?

Or watched how Uranium mining works and what gets left behind?

I doubt that.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#519

Post by nxy »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #506
nxy wrote: post #194

Whether people like it or not, nuclear power is the path forward for the foreseeable future; at least until nuclear fusion becomes a reality. With incoming AI/automation, ya’ll need all the power ya can get.

With basically almost nothing coming online for decades and the handful of projects that do come online being late, hundreds of percent over budget, and delivering only a relatively tiny amount of power (relative to the equivalent of hundreds of new reactors worth of solar/wind/battery every year), it's hard to maintain that nuclear has any role whatsoever to play. No amount of magical thinking is going to change tha…

"Decades" is an extreme POV. Big tech companies are actively investing into nuclear power. Unlike those green renewables you described, nuclear runs almost nonstop. At least 90%+ of the time! Let's not forget about China, who can do it faster and cheaper compared to western standards.

Obviously short term we'll be forced to use gas, renewables, etc. But saying nuclear will be irrelevant is wrong.. Reliable 24/7 clean power without the need for massive amounts of batteries or land is ideal.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#520

Post by crote »

chpatrick wrote: post #378
TheCondor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…

I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.

You should read up on the Asse II mine in Germany. They tried exactly this kind of naïve "just throw it in an old mine" approach, and it has turned into a giant headache as it is now slowly collapsing and trying to leak into the surrounding groundwater - if chemical reactions don't cause it to explode first.
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