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Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

nytimes.com

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Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#111

Post by coldtea »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #80
Krasnol wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like renewables getting better. So why even bother with that old, dangerous and radioactive tech? I really hope the lobby runs out of money soon...this artificial hype is terrible.

Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure. Dangerous? Even though nuclear fails catastrophically, it does so very infrequently, and few people die relative to other energy sources (hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident, coal kills more each day than nuclear ever killed). Nuclear safety per TWh is on par with wind and solar (which kill very few…

>Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby

No, he's just safely away from any fallout, hugely optimistic, naive about government competence and private sector morality (e.g. in cutting corners), and perfectly fine to rush technology and just wait and see the consequences and let the second order effects and externalities be suffered by others (which has nothing to do with science per se)...

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#112

Post by Krasnol »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #80
Krasnol wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like renewables getting better. So why even bother with that old, dangerous and radioactive tech? I really hope the lobby runs out of money soon...this artificial hype is terrible.

Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure. Dangerous? Even though nuclear fails catastrophically, it does so very infrequently, and few people die relative to other energy sources (hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident, coal kills more each day than nuclear ever killed). Nuclear safety per TWh is on par with wind and solar (which kill very few…

> Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure.

Old as in "outdated".

> hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident

Yeah flooding are surely more dramatic than a slow death through cancer, I give you that...and it's such a good selling point isn't it? You just can't see it or put a finger on it. Some numbers are far less dramatic then a flood. Too bad Netflix comes with that documentary on Chernobyl now. Need to pay for some more op-eds to cover that up.

> Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?

Do you have to be part of the lobby if you take the money? And I doubt it came from Goldstein or his publishers just to promote his book. The timing of the whole nuclear hype is just too coincidental.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#113

Post by wongarsu »

ianai wrote: post #33
istjohn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to…

“Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.” just that is all I need to know to prefer nuclear to coal.

Nuclear may well be better than coal, but coal isn't the plant of choice if you build something today. Coal is more expensive than natural gas, too expensive and slow to turn on and off (which is an increasing requirement as solar and wind become more common) and are opposed by the population for health reasons.

To be a viable alternative beating coal is irrelevant, nuclear would have to be at least better than natural gas. And with natural gas burning much cleaner than coal I'm not so sure nuclear has the advantage

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#114

Post by acidburnNSA »

_ph_ wrote: post #106
acidburnNSA wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we get a citation on the unsafe food in Germany from Chernobyl? That flies in the face of a lot of current progress in understanding the health effects of low-dose radiation. Precisely how high above natural background radiation levels is the stuff in Germany?

Sure, here you are: https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w... The short version is, that mushrooms accumulate cesium-137 which contaminates the soil in Bavarian forests. Equally affected are animals eating the mushrooms, mainly wild boar.

Can you read it? I'm looking for quantitative data and see: "Belastung von 0,008 Millisievert zur Folge."

If this is 8 microsieverts... what's the timescale? 8 microsieverts is quite small compared to everyday things like cosmic rays [1].

[1] https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#115

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

mpweiher wrote: post #8
fakwandi_priv wrote: post #5

>Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early. Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants? I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's. From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy b…

> why the Germans are retiring their plants Politicians bowing to the wishes of an ill-informed public.

Nobody really believes science that goes against their deep settled beliefs.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#116

Post by ajross »

jjordan wrote: post #58

Generation III+ reactors are orders of magnitude safer than everything else that was built before the turn of the century. China is actually leading the charge right now, with AP1000 reactors under construction. One of the plants just went live last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.

> The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.

Early reactors were hailed as paragons of safety too. Fukushima, remember, had a triply-redundant (or whatever) power supply to ensure that cooling power could be provided even in the event of a simultaneous meltdown and grid failure. Oops.

I mean, look. It's... fine. Go nuclear. I agree with you, that these are probably safe designs and are probably not going to poison anyone due to misanalyzed failure modes. Nuclear is carbon free power and preferable to coal and gas for sure.

But in a world where we can build out solar and wind as cheaply as we can gas plants and handle the grid buffering with batteries, I just don't care much anymore. If we run out of ridgeline real estate and still need more power, we'll call you.

The US doesn't "need" to do anything with nuclear, at all. The nuclear industry (and its geek proponents here on HN) needs to find a way to make itself worthwhile on a balance sheet.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#117

Post by detaro »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #114
_ph_ wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, here you are: https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w... The short version is, that mushrooms accumulate cesium-137 which contaminates the soil in Bavarian forests. Equally affected are animals eating the mushrooms, mainly wild boar.

Can you read it? I'm looking for quantitative data and see: "Belastung von 0,008 Millisievert zur Folge." If this is 8 microsieverts... what's the timescale? 8 microsieverts is quite small compared to everyday things like cosmic rays [1]. [1] https://xkcd.com/radiation/

It's for a 200g portion of (relatively highly contaminated) mushrooms, not a timescale.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#118

Post by [deleted] »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #105
catdog wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the beginning of this statement is not really true: > Germany, which went all-in for renewables… This might have been the case more than a decade ago with the green party being part of the government but the political climate changed. Angela Merkel talks a lot about saving the climate but actual policy is the opposite slowing down the switch to renewable energy as much as possible. > From what I read and hear Nu…

> Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster [citation needed]. It was in the 1950s, for sure, before we knew that you should ventilate the radon. Today a lot of it is done in ways that's much cleaner than mining for resources for coal, fracking, or heavy metals for millions upon millions of battery banks, wind turbines, and solar panels. Remember E=MC 2 is the key excitement about nuclear energy. T…

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#119

Post by threeseed »

jjordan wrote: post #58

Generation III+ reactors are orders of magnitude safer than everything else that was built before the turn of the century. China is actually leading the charge right now, with AP1000 reactors under construction. One of the plants just went live last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.

The only way to make nuclear reactors affordable is to build lots of them.

And nobody wants to build lots of them because in most countries nuclear is extremely unpopular and there are issues with disposal of waste.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#120

Post by vbezhenar »

jjordan wrote: post #58

Generation III+ reactors are orders of magnitude safer than everything else that was built before the turn of the century. China is actually leading the charge right now, with AP1000 reactors under construction. One of the plants just went live last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.

Russia builds affordable reactors. I think that US can try to ask them to build few.
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