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Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

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Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#101

Post by HarryHirsch »

Retric wrote: post #82
hwillis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because its a bit of a bait and switch. When people pull that out, it's about keeping existing plants running- extending them to run for 60+ years. That's pretty cheap, since the cost of fuel is tiny and you just need to pay for the ~1000 people onsite. The issue there is risk- you can't just open up all the valves to check how worn out they are, or if all the computers still have nice transistors and clean re…

That’s just part of the story, annual nuclear refueling is also surprisingly expensive. The raw material is cheap, but you need to refine it to reactor grade, creating fuel rods, and only use ~6% of it before replacing the rods. So on net it ends up being quite costly before considering long term storage. You also need to shutdown the reactor for refueling. Other costs like maintenance starts to really add up over ti…

Also the nuclear waste problem. Nuclear reprocessing looks nice on paper, but the technical implementation is problematic, it's chemistry but in a radioactive environment. If something catches on fire there's problems.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#102

Post by vbezhenar »

imtringued wrote: post #93
pfdietz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far the largest solar plant in the world is about 1500MW in China. That’s still only a fraction of the largest nuclear facilities in the world. Why is this a problem? If solar plants can be cheap without being big, that's a feature, not a bug.

In fact this is one of the biggest reasons why nuclear is failing. Building even just a single power plant is a project that is so large no single company can do it.

Rosatom built many power plants.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#103

Post by p1mrx »

etimberg wrote: post #68
dv_dt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the answer always reply with coal and oil instead of Renewables and storage?

Because you cannot simply replace conventional rotational generators with inverters. The inertia of the turbomachinery smooths out fluctuations in the grid keeping it stable. Lots of details in [0]. So without lots of hydro or synchronous wind generation, there will always been a need for some kind of conventional generation to keep the grid stable. 0. https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/10/25/grid-inertia...

If you're building a grid-scale battery storage system, isn't it a relatively straightforward engineering problem to emulate the inertia of a flywheel?

I would be much more concerned about batteries' ability to respond on the days/weeks/months scale than the milliseconds scale.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#104

Post by [deleted] »

Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#105

Post by mhh__ »

For a bit of perspective, it's worth considering that the Boeing 737-Max problems have killed more people than possibly all western and Japanese nuclear disasters combined (depends on how you count it).

Nuclear power is not without its dangers, but so is almost any other type of project of this scale - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano-Shushenskaya_power... (Even with Solar Power the risks are in the factories and mines that made the panel)

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#106

Post by pvaldes »

LatteLazy wrote: post #12

With advances in long distance power transmission, I don't know why theyre not being build on desert coasts. Does anyone know? The Singapore-Australia line is about the se distance as a Western Sahara-UK line would be... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Powe...

> I don't know why they're not being build on desert coast

If we talk about Western Sahara, those coasts are strategic areas for the economy of the planet and many big companies operate there.

My bet is that anybody enough silly to treat the huge fisheries, strategic maritime routes moving oil and raw materials, and the touristic areas adjacent in the Canary Islands, EU just with the purpose to build one nuclear plant would be sued to death and buried in a coffin of law papers. The boycott level would be insane.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#107

Post by corty »

mrtksn wrote: post #96
corty wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima and Czernobyl are reactor types that lack the features to fail gracefully. If you want to see an accident in a reactor that does, read about TMI. Newer reactors like EPRs are even more graceful when failing.

And what would be the excuse when the new reactors fail disastrously? None of the failed ones were considered dangerous before they fail, they were all supposed to be impossible to cause a disaster due to redundancies, passive and active safety mechanisms. They were all supposed to be built perfectly and the people who operate them were supposed to know what they are doing. Yet, we have Chernobyl and Fukushima. What…

The failed ones were known to be dangerous. Mostly that big problem was kept under radar of the public, oversight failed big time or was complicit. The other big problem is, we keep running old rustbuckets and dubious designs. More than half of the worlds reactors should probably be shut down immediately, and most of the rest is also due for a replacement very very soon.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#108

Post by aidenn0 »

steeve wrote: post #97
Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

Most of the cost of a MWh of nuclear comes from the cost of capital (interests). [1] Put differently, if capital is backed by the state, that the $/MWh could be a _lot_ less than it is. 1. https://imgur.com/a/4mAlUbO

This also seems to be a problem because the US seems to have gotten much worse at building fixed structures (bridges, buildints &c.) over the last 100 year.

Some of that cost is probably due to better workplace safety, but some of that cost has come in the past 40 years, and I don't feel like OSHA has tightened the screws that much in the psat 40 years.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#109

Post by mycall »

icedistilled wrote: post #98
Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

>Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Oh don't forget the other issue: It takes decades to build a new plant. We don't got that time. For the $6 Billion or more it takes to build a nuclear plant that will then take 15 to 20 years to license and build before it generates a single Watt, we could have had a $6 Billion of solar and wind deployed and operating for 12+ ye…

If we had enough solar to power the world, would all of the solar cells actually lower the temperature of Earth due to being black?

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#110

Post by whearyou »

Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

Strong disagree. And the brushing off of large scale risks from current technology, fail-deadly nuclear is very irresponsible.

Nuclear has the possibility for point-scale accidents to render large areas permanently uninhabitable. Given the fallibility of human social organizations point scale accidents are guaranteed in all domains. Therefor using nuclear power is conceding areas will be rendered uninhabitable. As we saw with the Chernobyl near miss and since, these areas may be as large as a continent in the case the point scale accident is bad.

Note all of this changes if nuclear technology is fail-safe. Examples include the fusion-seeded fission model, and the candlestick reactor model. Technology here is severely underfunded in interest of fail-deadly technologies more likely to be implemented and yield profit in the short term, even if we’re running huge risks by adopting them.

In the era of Covid where we see how badly our social systems can fail, the hand wavy attitude toward nuclear is simply appalling.

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