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A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

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Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#111

Post by mr_toad »

fogetti wrote: post #29
misiti3780 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted --- solar and wind account for 1.5% of total, taken from Enlightenment Now by Steve Pinker: > A second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source. Although renewable energy sources, particularly solar and wind, have become drastically cheaper, an…

Net wind energy percentage in Germany in 2017 was 18.9%. And that's a fact. Which clearly voids your argument. Yes, there are limitations how high it can go and I don't expect it to be anywhere near 100%. But it's clearly a huge source of energy already and it will increase even more in the coming years. The reason why it totals 1.5% is because it costs money to replace existing power sources and the lobby power of t…

Germany can import French power. That’s a big part of the reason they can get away with a low base capacity and avoid price spikes.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#112

Post by pdonis »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #91
pdonis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Sure we do: reprocess it, like every country except the US that uses nuclear power does. The only reason the US doesn't is stupid politics.

Not really true. Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper. It's a economic issue. France recycles their fuel once but they still only get 2% of the total energy out of the resource that's mined. Another super-reasonable thing to do with nuclear waste is burying it in large salt deposits or deep crystalline bedrock. Both are actually totally reasonable and practical solutions. Peo…

> Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper.

That's true now, yes. But anyone who realizes this also realizes (as you do) that nuclear waste disposal is not an issue: you just store the spent fuel now, and at some point (in the not too distant future if we were actually using nuclear energy for a large portion of base load power), mining and enriching new fuel will be more expensive than reprocessing, at which point all of that so-called "waste" will be useful. The idea that it needs to be stored safely for tens or hundreds of thousands of years is just ludicrous.

Also, reprocessing makes disposal of what's left over much easier, because the stuff you actually have to dispose of afterwards (i.e,. the stuff that isn't now reprocessed fuel) has much shorter half-lives and so only needs to be safely sequestered for a much shorter time.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#113

Post by gdpgreg »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #93
chongli wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launching waste into space with a rocket is a silly idea. We don't really care if the waste gets damaged as long as it doesn't break up and make a mess. Why not build a giant railgun to launch it?

I'd consider them equally as silly, considering we're actually capable of launching rockets into space yet the closest we've gotten with a space gun is a measly 180km apogee @ 3.6km/s[0]. The original question was why we don't send our nuclear waste into space. We can't send our nuclear waste into space using a rail gun because we can't currently send anything into space with a rail gun. Otherwise here's a good discu…

Cause someone murdered the leading scientist in the field. Also there's concerns that it'd be too easy to turn it essentially into a very long range, highly effective weapon that could lob nuclear or conventional projectiles at countries on the other side of the planet with little to no warning.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#114

Post by ben_w »

ThomPete wrote: post #78
toomuchtodo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries can be recycled, nuclear waste is stockpiled with no permanent disposal or recycling plan in sight. Solar and wind, unsubsidized, with storage, are already cheaper than nuclear. Those costs will continue to plummet, especially as EV battery demand ramps (rapidly expanding battery manufacturing capacity). Nuclear lost because it’s too expensive, and has its own externalities to ignore (decommissioning, waste…

Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that. Its not too expensive its very cheap, its the regulation around that makes it expensive which can be solved too.

> Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that.

No it can’t. Any given atom stops being uranium after it fissions. Some of the waste can be reprocessed because not all is fissioned, but even then there is a lot of literally untouchable waste left over — well, literally untouchable if you want to live: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#115

Post by ThomPete »

ben_w wrote: post #114
ThomPete wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that. Its not too expensive its very cheap, its the regulation around that makes it expensive which can be solved too.

> Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that. No it can’t. Any given atom stops being uranium after it fissions. Some of the waste can be reprocessed because not all is fissioned, but even then there is a lot of literally untouchable waste left over — well, literally untouchable if you want to live: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.

Furthermore, the price of uranium is so cheap that it's financially feasible right now. It will be over time but that should also show you just how abundant and available it is as a resource.

If we actually got politicians to sit down and go through the requirements with engineers and scientists they would realize how cheap and still safe it can be.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#116

Post by rblion »

thatcat wrote: post #17
imtringued wrote: post #14

With a new projected cost of 25 billion USD the cost overruns of the Vogtle Plant are worse than I thought. There is a reason why nuclear is losing to natural gas and coal. It's too damn expensive and takes too long. If this money was instead spent on building more storage capacity we'd have solved our energy problems a long time ago and even if we started today we'd be done long before the nuclear plant is online. T…

Your cost analysis neglects replacement, disposal costs for batteries, long term costs of carbon emission, and coal flyash disposal. The only reason nuclear is losing to gas and coal is because the externalities of the mess they make are dumped on the public, whereas nuclear pollution and waste processing is heavily regulated.

I love Hacker News. Reddit is elementary compared to the quality of comments like these.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#117

Post by jabl »

justtopost wrote: post #110
intopieces wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link, solar doesn't rely on the grid, and in fact it acts independently of it on some islands.

For the network effects and efficencies, solar absolutly needs a grid. If not a grid, you need local storage, another inefficiency.

IIRC there was some article linked to on hn some time ago where it was explained that most rooftop solar installations actually don't work at all without a grid. If the grid goes down, so does the solar. It's of course technically possible to fix, but costs more.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#118

Post by bovine3dom »

pfdietz wrote: post #104
shanghaiaway wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting armchair analysis. Nuclear is both the cheapest and cleanest source of energy.

Nuclear is by no means the cheapest source of energy. That's the big problem it's facing: it has priced itself out of the market.

It hasn't priced itself out of the market - Governments insisting that it is many orders of magnitude safer [1] than any other form of power generation have unsurprisingly made it very expensive and over-engineered.

Nuclear quite simply needs to be given its fair share of blood to be competitive - to get wind power down to the same level of safety we'd have to build robots to climb the turbines to maintain them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#119

Post by WalterBright »

BurningFrog wrote: post #73
jazzyjackson wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... what's the over-under on dropping barrels into a volcano? You get a little radioactive steam surely...but eventually turns into radioactive dust... As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Like does more beta-decay mean it gets to safe levels faster? Maybe a few years in between tectonic plates would do a planet good eh?

The classic answer is to bury extremely long lived waste in a subduction zone at the bottom of the ocean, such as the Mariana Trench. A "subduction zone" is where two tectonic plates collide and fold into the depth of the planet. So anything you bury there would naturally travel deeper into the planet over the eons. I haven't heard any serious arguments against this, but I suspect it's impossible because people think…

Extremely long lived radioactive waste will, inevitably, have extremely low levels of radioactivity. I.e. not an issue.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#120

Post by WalterBright »

beaconstudios wrote: post #36
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because a misfire would result in a fine mist of nuclear fallout spread over the entire planet

hmm, I guess that's not ideal.

If it's spread out over the planet, the resulting radiation would be insignificant.
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