The article ignores the elephant in the room: the problems he discusses are all more directly a result of too many humans for the closed system planet. Period.
Energy
91–100 of 287 posts
Re: Energy
#92The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy (i.e. terrestrial atomic generation and energy from sun’s fusion). It's silly to describe solar as atomic energy from sun’s fusion as a distinct category from carbon-based energy, because of course carbon-based energy was formed by capturing solar energy from the sun's fusion.
How is this anything but useless pedantry?
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Re: Energy
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear power plants in the U.S. pay a fee for waste disposal. Those fees have accumulated in a fund, currently amounting to over $30 billion. The money was going to go to Yucca Mountain, until that project was shut down. The long-lived fission products are a very small portion of the total waste, and if we only had fission products to worry about, the total waste would go back to the radioactivity of the original or…
I really hope it's more than £30bn. No-one seems to know how much it costs to decommission one, but a link above says "range from $280-$612 million." Ouch.
I'm talking about the fund for long-term waste storage. Operators pay for decommissioning themselves in most countries, and about 90 commercial nuclear plants plus various other reactors have been shut down, with 15 fully dismantled. Once the fuel is removed, the remaining radioactivity has a short half-life. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear...
Re: Energy
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> using reactors designed to use the waste as fuel What do you mean? The waste is full of nuclear poisons (a technical term, isotopes that stop fission by neutron capture). Reusing it means reprocessing to extract the Plutonium, which is burnable in a reactor (particularly as MOX). The chemistry required for this is pretty messy, and the radioactive environment (fuel from a power station is very 'hot' radioactively s…
The main problem with reprocessing is fears of weapons proliferation, which is an odd fear when it happens in countries that already have large piles of nuclear weapons, but there we are. The waste is mostly still full of fuel. Advanced designs like the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor could make this simpler and cheaper. What to do with the UK's plutonium seems obvious to me: use it as nuclear fuel. If this is…
Hardly an odd fear when adding new systematic components to the material supply chain massively increases the chance of some of that supply leaking.
Not doing that route makes you less exposed to risk.
In an extremely complex world where risk needs to be minimized as much as possible, it's totally reasonable for society to decide not to extract plutonium at mass scale in a free market way.
Sure if the military controlled the whole thing (as they do via their own supply chain) that could perhaps feel more secure... but who controls outflows of waste between governments, etc?
Re: Energy
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not paranoia, it's a real issue with that waste. We have no working waste solution as of today. We have no working long term storage solution as of today. We have not priced the cost of long term storage/plant decomissioning etc at the full cost into the price of nuclear power - that is for most countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dealing-with-ass...
What's wrong with copying the solution used for all the other toxic waste modern industry produces? We have no working long term solution for storing arsenic, but people mostly seem fine with "just dispose of it in a way where it doesn't leech into the groundwater" and not the crazy restrictions everyone wants to put on nuclear waste storage.
I am not a tox/haz/nuclear waste engineer (someone?) but I assume that groundwater threatening waste is being regarded differently than highly radioactive substances.
Can't you protect yourself and go cleanup an arsenic spill "easily" compared to how you would cleanup a radioactive spent fuel rod container which tore open?
IIRC the latter is a real issue currently at Asse in Germany.
Re: Energy
#96I suspect solar (including wind/biomass) + batteries is going to trounce fission reactors in the not terribly long term. If you think of finance in terms of latency/bandwidth (a model I use for lots of things), reactors are high latency - they're expensive and take a long time to set up. Meanwhile, solar/wind is heading toward dirt cheap and trivial to set up. Environmental impact is minimal, too. It doesn't require…
Solar is indirectly fusion power.
Re: Energy
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> using reactors designed to use the waste as fuel What do you mean? The waste is full of nuclear poisons (a technical term, isotopes that stop fission by neutron capture). Reusing it means reprocessing to extract the Plutonium, which is burnable in a reactor (particularly as MOX). The chemistry required for this is pretty messy, and the radioactive environment (fuel from a power station is very 'hot' radioactively s…
The main problem with reprocessing is fears of weapons proliferation, which is an odd fear when it happens in countries that already have large piles of nuclear weapons, but there we are. The waste is mostly still full of fuel. Advanced designs like the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor could make this simpler and cheaper. What to do with the UK's plutonium seems obvious to me: use it as nuclear fuel. If this is…
Hardly an odd fear when adding new systematic components to the material supply chain massively increases the chance of some of that supply leaking.
Not doing that route makes you less exposed to risk.
In an extremely complex world where risk needs to be minimized as much as possible, it's totally reasonable for society to decide not to extract plutonium at mass scale in a free market way.
Sure if the military controlled the whole thing (as they do via their own supply chain) that could perhaps feel more secure... but who controls outflows of waste between governments, etc?
Oh and the mind-boggling cost. Who pays?
Nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of energy when you cost in the full price of making it safe, including dealing with waste and ensuring absolutely no proliferation of weapons.
Re: Energy
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll counter your wikipedia links with the issues and costs associated with decommissioning in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Decommissioning_Author... Current estimates for one Nuclear Power Plant Site (Sellafield): £114bn which seems A LOT!
Sellafield isn't an ordinary nuclear power station. It was part of the UK's nuclear weapons program and contained some of the UK's earliest (maybe the earliest) nuclear reactors. It's not going to be representative of the decommissioning costs of modern generation II or generation III reactors.
It's also the site of one of the most ridiculous nuclear accidents in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
Regardless of how much one is for or against nuclear power, i think we can all come together and agree strongly that building an air cooled nuclear reactor that uses a flammable substance as a moderator and blows exhaust out a chimney is a catastrophically bad idea.
And I don't imagine that kind of activity results in easy cleanup.
Re: Energy
#99Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the individual. Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors, etc. Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and installing it at home.…
Decentralization to the community level is almost as good and works for people who live in apartments and such. Both ycombinator projects would qualify; Helion's reactor would be 50MW and fit in a shipping container, and produce very little neutron radiation.
Re: Energy
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost will vary significantly from plant to plant - this range is likely due to plant-to-plant variation - not uncertainty in the cost for any single plant. Do you have a citation/reference for that?
Yeah, sure, it's linked above which is why I didn't reference it: http://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html Cost does seem quite high right?
Since it costs several billion to build a plant, that decommissioning cost is somewhere around 10-20% of the construction cost, which doesn't seem too bad.