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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

#751

Post by budsniffer952 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #474
Danox wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service. I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Ima…

Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.

You think this is a modern American problem?

What if I told you Europeans used to throw people in jail (or worse ) for claiming the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun?

This is a forever problem.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#752

Post by oneshtein »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #745
awesome_dude wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have a lot of technology that we knew existed in earlier civilisations - the Aztecs, Mayans, pueblo peoples, the Easter islanders, to name just a few were doing things we have no idea how to do

Ridiculous, not knowing exactly how stoneage peoples carved and moved rocks and dirt around doesn’t mean we don’t know how to move rocks and dirt.

We cannot carve and move rocks and dirt like they did: https://odysee.com/@hiddenincatours:3/megalithic-saqsaywaman...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#753

Post by Krasnol »

mpweiher wrote: post #717
Krasnol wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are renewables more dangerous?

"How" is not really a relevant question in this context. They are, empirically. Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe, meaning it doesn't really matter that much which of these you use, the overall risk is always going to be very low, and the relative numbers are going to be very sensitive to small changes or variations in analyses. Hydro is significantly more dangerous, and all…

> Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe

Who said that?

What are you talking about? How is a solar panel even on the same safety-shelf with nuclear material??

What are you talking about??

> A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.

Which is again related to the Astroturf tactic of playing nuclear vs. coal and is not related to today's calculations where it is renewables vs. nuclear.

Would you please stop derailing the discussion with this?

Nuclear peaked in the 90 and is being overtaken by renewables in certain countries as well as probably worldwide this year: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

It is actually renewables which lead to coal being removed from the mix. Not nuclear:

https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#754

Post by RetroTechie »

gambiting wrote: post #721
eqvinox wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> full compliance with the directive I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter. Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…

But again: >>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker. Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to…

There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that.

Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.

Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#755

Post by throw0101c »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #701
throw0101c wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar. In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2: * https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2025... On the spectrum from "cheap" to expensive, where would that fall? For many years it was actu…

Now Ontario wants to double the electricity bills to finance its nuclear refurbs and new builds. https://reneweconomy.com.au/ontario-utility-wants-to-double-...

Ontario's Financial Accountability Office, which reports to provincial parliament and is independent of the government, concluded that at least for the refurbs:

> * The FAO estimates that the Plan will result in nuclear generation supplying a significant proportion of Ontario electricity demand from 2016 to 2064 at an average price of $80.7/MWh in 2017 dollars. (For reference, the 2017 Nuclear Price is $69/MWh and the current price of electricity for most residential and small business ratepayers is $114.9/MWh.)

> * The Nuclear Price will be higher than the average price of $80.7/MWh during the majority of the time that the reactors are being refurbished from 2016 to 2033. Post refurbishment, ratepayers will benefit from a lower than average Nuclear Price.

> * Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.

> * OPG will realize a financial return from the operation of the DNGS and PNGS. OPG is owned by the Province and any return would improve the Province’s fiscal position. There is no significant fiscal impact to the Province from the refurbishment of reactors at the BNGS as it is operated by Bruce Power, a private sector organization.

* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...

I was not able to find a similar report (pro or con) for new build, though I think the current plan with some SMRs in Ontario is dumb: if we decide on more nuclear, we should stick with big(ger) CANDU, as there's little point in small reactors in a large grid like Ontario.

Renewable programs have also cost Ontario ratepayers quite a bit of money, for not a lot of electricity generated:

* https://ospe.on.ca/advocacy/green-energy-contracts-fao-repor...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#756

Post by fc417fc802 »

lukan wrote: post #707
fc417fc802 wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an absurd thought experiment to illustrate that even when taken to an extreme the volume is small enough that a solution broadly remains feasible.

No, it really does not seem feasible to me. In germany alone, 500 000 m³ of radioactive material is to be disposed somehow by 2050. Having people carry that underground sounds insane. There is more to waste than fuel rods. And even they .. amount to a really high number if you factor in shielding.

I think you have a serious misconception. The long term storage we're talking about here is for the spent fuel rods (or alternatively the byproducts extracted from them if they are reprocessed). It's known as high level waste and there isn't very much of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

> As a general rule, short-lived waste (mainly non-fuel materials from reactors) is buried in shallow repositories, while long-lived waste (from fuel and fuel reprocessing) is deposited in geological repository.

> Overall, the 60-year-long nuclear program in the UK up until 2019 produced 2150 m3 of HLW.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#757

Post by pfdietz »

SXX wrote: post #463
pfdietz wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which nuclear plants were replaced with coal plants? If you say "German plants", I'll point out coal consumption for power generation in Germany has gone down since the decision to phase out nuclear. Coal consumption would likely have gone down even more with nuclear still being used, but that doesn't support your claim as stated.

This is not just about specific plants. Its about the fact that deployment of nuclear slowed down dramatically in last 30 years. Coal is still generating a third of whole world power and polluting everywhere a lot.

Well if that was what it was about, it's what you should have said, instead of lying about nuclear plants being replaced by coal plants.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#758

Post by pfdietz »

jrflowers wrote: post #460
pfdietz wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not a good thing, but it's also not an example of the claim that countries replaced nuclear with coal. Still waiting on those countries from the previous poster.

What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery. If Germany eventually got more renewables, great. That does not retroactively mean that they didn’t replace nuclear with coal. That’s just replacing nuclear with coal and then doing something else afterward . It’s like if someone left their first wife and got married to someone else, then did th…

> What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery.

Still waiting for examples of countries that did that.

Also, that's not replacing nuclear with coal. Plants age out and are replaced even if one is not replacing one kind with the other. We retire pickup trucks and build sports cars; that doesn't mean sports cars are replacing pickup trucks.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#759

Post by inigyou »

esarbe wrote: post #221
UltraSane wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.

No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative. We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive. It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition". [0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...

The American regime has recently solved this problem by removing safety requirements - they have de-recognized the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage, which means the official fact is that there is a threshold of radiation that's safe to receive. That threshold is, of course, just above whatever one of the nuclear reactors they're about to build will emit. They removed the "as low as reasonably possible" design goal which means it's now allowed to dump radioactive waste into a river to save money

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#760

Post by bryanlarsen »

tcfhgj wrote: post #735
bryanlarsen wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly when pumped hydro shines. Increasing the storage reservoir capacity is cheap. It's the turbines and infrastructure that's expensive, but that doesn't change if you're only increasing the capacity.

All the cheap storage reservoir capacity is already used - from where are you going to get more?

All the cheap storage capacity with natural flow have been taken.

Pumped hydro doesn't need natural flow, because it uses pumps. All it needs is a height differential. Here's 22,000 in Australia alone. There are millions worldwide.

https://arena.gov.au/knowledge-bank/anu-stores-an-atlas-of-p...

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