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The Nuclear Option

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Re: The Nuclear Option

#101

Post by pjc50 »

trimbo wrote: post #5

Sigh. I've been arguing this for so long, and gave up about 5 years ago. I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon, yet it won't happen for so many reasons. * There are too many solar and wind success stories to point to. "Why can't NYC be like Scotland with wind power?!" You start to list the reasons and the response is "we can accomplish it if we put our minds to it!". It's an endless cycle…

There's a long shadow in this which isn't very much discussed: nuclear weapons.

Up until the 1990s it was generally accepted that the greatest risk to humanity was not the slow problems of global warning but the near-instant destruction of an exchange of the thousands of ICBM-delivered nuclear warheads possessed by the two-and-a-half superpowers. These weapons depended on a supply of plutonium. Therefore many of the earlier reactors (eg Windscale/Sellafield) were built in a tremendous hurry to ensure enough plutonium.

Conversely, on the other side, environmentalists focused on cutting off the supply of plutonium to weapons. Recall that Greenpeace got started campaigning against nuclear bomb testing. This attracted hostility from governments, up to and including the French DGSE sinking the Rainbow Warrior and murdering the photographer who was on board. This has affected the subsequent debate because there is no trust.

The nuclear trust issue affects which countries are allowed to have nuclear reactors (see Iran, Iraq).

In the 2000s the big question was terrorism: would nuclear plants be vulnerable to attack, including crashed planes, and how could they be secured? Meanwhile a trillion dollars was spent on a largely pointless war, proving which kinds of threats are taken seriously and which aren't.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#102

Post by jabl »

pjc50 wrote: post #92
atombender wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a new book out, reviewed recently by the New York Times, that wants to change that perception. "A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow" [1] is co-written by an engineer who lays out the case for nuclear power. The authors think that rapid deployment of nuclear power is the only way to avoid a climate catastrophe. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/books/revi…

How rapid is "rapid deployment of nuclear power", given that the plants take decades to build?

1) We can (and should!) build multiple plants in parallel. The sooner we start the better.

2) Countries like South Korea manage to build nuclear plants in around 4 years or so. The secret is that they have standardized on a design, and are building it again and again. There is hope that SMR's will make it easier to produce plants on time and budget, but those are still some years off.

3) Compare how the carbon emissions from electricity production in Germany has changed since they started their "Energiewende" project where they are phasing out nuclear and are deploying a lot of solar and wind. For comparison, look at e.g. the nuclear buildout in France (mostly from the late 1970'ies to the early 1990'ies).

Re: The Nuclear Option

#103

Post by Maakuth »

pdonis wrote: post #67
dv_dt wrote: post #18

Just about every builder and operator of large nuclear fleets of reactors have all outright said or implied by their actions that nuclear is uneconomical vs renewable power options. The massive bulge of capital and scheduling needed points to humans not being able to build a next generation of nuclear plants in time to head off the worst climate change, and renewable energy sources being both faster and cheaper to bu…

None of this has anything to do with technical problems with building nuclear reactors. The US Navy has been hiring private contractors to build them for decades with no such issues. (And Naval reactors have more stringent requirements than commercial ones, because of the widely varying loads they have to deal with.) The so-called "cost savings" in France are due to unrealistically optimistic assumptions about renewa…

It depends how you defined technical issue. For example the French Areva power plant projects in Europe have been met with all sorts of issues ranging from subcontractors that are inexperienced with NPP level of quality and documentation requirements all the way to challenge of proving automation system reliability to the regulatory body. These happen in the plant vendor's native France as well, so shouldn't be cultural issues either. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

These are not NIMBY or political issues, but rather stem from the fact that there's been a long pause in building new NPPs in the west. All the senior people involved with earlier designs are long since retired and even the juniors that were around might have moved on. And also some of the technology choices used in old designs are not even available anymore, so there's new families of tech to prove to the regulators, digital automation being one of these to my understanding.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#104

Post by kortilla »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #48
rurounijones wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good point and I don't know enough to answer (if you have any good info sources about this I would appreciate them). Aside from the Tesla battery in Oz (which is more about stabilization rather than primary supply) I don't know of any large-scale battery storage systems. I get the feeling that we are ignoring the scaling part here (We Just have to scale-up). Since the battery systems would need to be big en…

You’d need 0.6% of the continental US land mass for solar panels, and 1 mile by 1 mile of batteries to power the entire US off of solar. This doesn’t include tens of thousands of EVs sold each month, which is rapidly increasing the aggregate amount of distributed energy storage available to the grid.

That’s not right. That’s only about 5 times the size of the gigafactory and there is no way that has nearly the capacity to power the entire US for 9+ hours of continuous darkness. You need to check your math...

Unless you meant a cubic mile of batteries, in which case that’s completely unrealistic to manufacture.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#105

Post by jabl »

sasavilic wrote: post #80
kijin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping radioactive waste far away from anyone who might be harmed by it, even for thousands of years, is a solved problem. We know how to bury stuff deep underground in a geologically stable region. Or if you prefer, throw it in a subduction zone. As with most things nuclear-related, the real problem is NIMBY. If a country as large and sparsely populated as the U.S. can't agree on a place to bury nuclear waste, ther…

I am not convinced that it is a solved problem. How old are Egyptian pyramids? Yet there is a lot of stuff that we don't know about them. We are confident, that after 20 000 years, people will still know about nuclear waste storage facilities? Think about it: records could be lost, our language will be different. Why are we so sure that somebody will not dig it up?

The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially. After a few hundred years, most of it is gone, although there is of course the danger due to the chemical toxicity, just like any other heavy metal deposit. Obsessing over what could happen if somebody digs it up after 10000 years is not anchored in reality.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#106

Post by JackPoach »

There's just no way nuclear is making a come back until the economic issues are resolved. Almost all nuclear projects are over budget and over time by 2x or 3x, except for plants built in/by Russia, India, China

Re: The Nuclear Option

#107

Post by kortilla »

ben_w wrote: post #90
pdonis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the losses of planet-scale grids are small compared to the cost-advantage that solar has. You could literally power your home at night from the sun hitting the other side of the planet. You're comparing apples and widgets. The losses of planet-scale grids are way too large to make it even feasible to power your home at night from the other side of the planet: not enough power would be left by the time it got to you…

“””the authors measured the corona loss of a 765kV, 3 phase, and bundled transmission line to be about 1.87kW/km in fair weather. This amounts to only about a 0.083% loss over a 1000km line. In bad weather, however, the authors measured the loss to be 84.3kW/km, or about a 3.7% loss.””” - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/ 3.7% loss = (100-3.7)/100 multiplier per 1000km = 0.963 Half world circumst…

Ffs, corona loss is only one small factor of transmission loss. https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po...

Ignoring that major oversight, transmission lines aren’t free and they require upkeep so building/maintaining them across the ocean needs to be factored into your costs.

It’s like claiming it’s cheaper to have sushi flown in from Japan everyday if you just ignore the air freight cost.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#108

Post by jabl »

victorp13 wrote: post #87
intopieces wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not "rightfully scared." Even if you take the highest number of death estimates -- all the way from the initial incident through the people who died in evacuation all the way those who will die of cancer in 20 years -- the death toll is staggeringly low compared to carbon emissions. It just so happens that radiation is scary and deaths happen all at once.

Don't just count deaths: Nuclear fallout has profound long-term negative effects that coal accidents do not. At Fukushima, nearly 80.000 people are still displaced, almost eight years later. Source: http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/

That's true, but OTOH those people are displaced due to fear of radiation (and due to large areas being trashed by the tsunami), not due to the actual effects of radiation.

And FFS, something like 15000 people were killed by the Tsunami, while 0 have died due to radiation released by the plant. Yet we continue to obsess about the nuclear accident. WTF?

Re: The Nuclear Option

#109

Post by atemerev »

pjc50 wrote: post #101
trimbo wrote: post #5

Sigh. I've been arguing this for so long, and gave up about 5 years ago. I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon, yet it won't happen for so many reasons. * There are too many solar and wind success stories to point to. "Why can't NYC be like Scotland with wind power?!" You start to list the reasons and the response is "we can accomplish it if we put our minds to it!". It's an endless cycle…

There's a long shadow in this which isn't very much discussed: nuclear weapons. Up until the 1990s it was generally accepted that the greatest risk to humanity was not the slow problems of global warning but the near-instant destruction of an exchange of the thousands of ICBM-delivered nuclear warheads possessed by the two-and-a-half superpowers. These weapons depended on a supply of plutonium. Therefore many of the…

A plane crash attack is no different than any other type of accident; it can be integrated in the incident response plan (much less dangerous than tsunami). This is not the big problem.

The bigger problem is proliferation. All nuclear power plants produce plutonium from fuel stocks, which goes straight to the waste. Plutonium can be chemically separated from the nuclear waste, which is not quite easy, but much much easier than isotope separation. Thankfully, a single neutron capture transforms Pu-239 to Pu-240, which is unusable in nuclear weapons (if it wasn't the case, human civilization would have ended decades ago), and it is (or was) nearly impossible to separate these two isotopes. To obtain relative pure Pu-239, fuel assemblies or special U-238 rods need to be extracted early in the campaign, which is observable (unless a reactor is specifically designed for that). Unfortunately, modern laser isotope separation methods (spin chemistry, magnetic isotope effects) make it possible to separate Pu-239 from Pu-240. Most of the details are classified, but secrets can work only for a limited time.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#110

Post by sametmax »

gotocake wrote: post #8
trimbo wrote: post #5

Sigh. I've been arguing this for so long, and gave up about 5 years ago. I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon, yet it won't happen for so many reasons. * There are too many solar and wind success stories to point to. "Why can't NYC be like Scotland with wind power?!" You start to list the reasons and the response is "we can accomplish it if we put our minds to it!". It's an endless cycle…

The overall incredible ignorance around nuclear is staggering. If you ask the average person how many people have died as a result of the Chernobyl incident, they’re usually going to estimate high by orders of magnitude. In general what people don’t understand about radiation is effectively everything about it, and worse, they don’t want to know. Meanwhile trying to explain how many million die each and every year fr…

> The overall incredible ignorance around nuclear is staggering. If you ask the average person how many people have died as a result of the Chernobyl incident, they’re usually going to estimate high by orders of magnitude.

Downplaying it doesn't help either.

In France the medias and politicians repeated again and again that the radioactive cloud didn't cross the border. Not only lying for such a thing is disgusting, but it's also moronic to think people would believe it.

Decades later, now have a decent overview of the increase of thyroid cancer near the border in the years after the incident. I have a friend that had his life shattered because of it.

I'm pro nuclear, but every time there is that much on the line, those in charge stop respecting the people, so of course it's going to create strong opposition.

How do you want to establish any kind of trust in the technology if when there is a catastrophy, you make sure to betray the victims ?

Everytime there is a problem, the authorities pretend everything is under control. Not it's not. If it had been, we woudln't have had the accident in the first place.

Honesty would be to have very mediatic continuous monitoring of the situtations for the next 10 years. The president should state every year an honest status on the matter. We all know fukushima is still leaking in the ocean radioactive materials: following the impact of it should be not only transparent, but vocal, and honest.

Nobody respect kids hidding after they fucked up, saying "no I didn't do it".

Nuclear is more of a political problem that a technical one, and we, humans, suck at those.

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