121–130 of 132 posts
Any chance there's a Russian version of this somewhere?
Editor here. These were originally written in English, so we have plans to translate to Russian, which might take a while since we only have one fully-qualified translator. Help is welcome! Shoot me an email (included in my profile).
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>You're not taking into account all the people who didn't die immediately but long before their time because of cancer. Neither are you, you're speculating that they must exist in high numbers. That quote doesn't show anything, that could be a coincidence and frequently is a vague term for a very busy individual. There has been a noticeable increase in thyroid cancer incidents in the area, but treated thyroid cancer…
and how many will die from starvation this year? Here's a hint, more than all those who died from nuclear accidents and dam breaks. You could total them all up and you might get to this year's starvation numbers. The point is, there is no good outcome in a pissing match over what has the most negative impact when we routinely ignore any number of causes of death that we can be fixing but don't. The threat to hydro is…
That isn't the point, any time you mention nuclear power you get a swarm of people saying it's so unsafe and we need to move towards renewables. It's safer than the largest renewable source currently, and the UN considers some nuclear power a renewable source. The US doesn't, largely due to fossil fuel lobbying.
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Isn't population growth close to zero for most industrialized countries?
What's your point? I am not blaming other countries being irresponsible in controlling population. I was saying simply control population is not as easy a social policy to carry out.
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> Uranium in seawater is replenished by erosion through streams at a rate faster than we could ever burn it. Isn't there a substantial energy cost associated with collecting that Uranium? The same goes for gold, there is a huge amount of gold in seawater and yet, nobody has been able to extract it in a way that left money on the table after the process had run.
Great question, and one that I don't have a quantitative reply to on hand. The thing with uranium is that it is so unimaginably energy dense that with the success we've seen so far in seawater extraction technology, it's hard to imagine the energy required for extraction being anything but minuscule in comparison. Obviously there's a limit of concentration where this becomes not true but my understanding is that we a…
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Hi, interesting answers. 1) Could you tell me more about replenishment of Uranium in seawater, or point me towards your source? Wouldn't it mean that we would reach a maximum saturation of Uranium in the ocean after some time (with precipitation of excess Uranium in the form of salts)? Have you seen / access to estimates of Uranium electrode deposition cost from water? Are they cost competitive in any way in comparis…
Thanks, and sure. You're right to be skeptical. The renewability of uranium isn't a widely accepted idea and unfortunately is hard to definitively prove experimentally due to the hilariously long time scales. So we're left with less rigorous claims of this to treat rationally more than scientifically. Also, haha: 'fishy'! Here's a good source: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/11/3088/htm And it points to an older one:…
thank you very much for your detailed elaboration on the subject, and the references. I was not aware of the bigger, geologic perspective:
~ 3 mg Uranium in 1 m^3 ocean water.
The sentence that our energy requirements could be covered with breeder reactor systems for 50K years made my smile, though. It will be probably the lack of higher "level fuels" such as proteins and carbohydrates that give us headaches, first.
Please note that I am not at all hypercritical regarding nuclear energy. There is a lot of industrial and green propaganda out there, and it is sad to see that we scientist are loosing the battle in media. Too often, rigorous scientific explanations in not sexy enough for us apes.
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What's your point? I am not blaming other countries being irresponsible in controlling population. I was saying simply control population is not as easy a social policy to carry out.
That it isn't human nature that is the problem with population growth, otherwise we wouldn't have large parts of the free world with almost none and even slightly negative growth. The problem is cultural/historical and the problem of chinas one child policy was that it tried to combat the effect while the people still saw having a male heir as important.
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There are a number of problems with nuclear power. 1. The world's uranium supply won't actually go that far [1]. 2. A lot of places aren't suitable for nuclear reactors (eg they're seismically active). 3. We have to trust either corporations or governments to run such plants. Corporations will tend to maximize short term profits at the cost of long term safety. Governments will tend to do the same for budgetary reaso…
Thanks for posting. I'm in the nuclear industry and would like to try to address some of these issues if you don't mind. 1. Uranium in seawater is replenished by erosion through streams at a rate faster than we could ever burn it. It is effectively totally sustainable and even renewable on a 4+ billion year time frame, even without breeder reactors. But really, breeder reactors will become a thing when uranium gets e…
While you point out that there are technical solution to the challenges I strongly believe Countries/Corporations/Governments are not willing or capable of operating these plants to a safe standard and earn money doing so.
The whole issue of decommissioning and deconstruction is only in its infancy and already a huge money drain on the backs of the people and not the Corporates who earned money for 30 years running the plant. I think we should speak of deconstruction and not of demolition. Demolition is mainly smashing buildings to pebbles with a big steel ball, for nuclear power plants that is not the case. See [1] or [2] - sorry both in German
Re 1. Until the technology has actually been built and scaled up we won't know what technical details and challenged await us. I don't see that as a reason to not do it but rather a call for caution on over-optimistic timeline.
Re 2. Indeed many aspects of the reactors have been improved on paper/in theories. See for example the European Pressurized Reactor [3]. The first 3 plants to that nature are riddled with technical detail problems and budget overruns, see [4]. When I was at Unit learning about EPR most lecturers where approaching retirement or already past retirement. The nuclear power industry - at least for the German part - has had the issue of very few skilled successors. This might have a big role in the building of the actual new types of plants. 35-45 years ago when the current old plants where built there was a large pool of experts - engineers, construction, QA/QC - they are all retired now.
Re 3. That is good, and there surely are technical solutions but I am very sure they are no easy find. Just think about the discussion of material selection for certain vessels in light of the current material embitterment news from Belgium Power plants [5]. I'm not saying that these issues are insurmountable but that the process to get to an agreed (experts and governments) new solution is slow and painful with no ETA.
Re 4. In Germany at least the search for a repository was driven by politics into the wrong direction. This should have been driven buy science and technology people. By now the topic is so far down the drain so that changing course is political suicide. Another point regarding the waste is the discussion of marking the nuclear wasted depositories for >1000 or rather 10000 years. Interesting YC discussion here [6]
[1] http://www.focus.de/finanzen/eon-spaltet-akws-ab-muessen-jet... [2] https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/milliarde... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_energy_in_Belgium#Hydr... [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530978
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I think it should be kept in mind that the design of Soviet reactors was incredibly unsafe compared to their western counterparts. Fukushima had four meltdowns with only a few casualties.
This is not true in this form. There were unsafe soviet designs, but also there were unsafe western designs. Soviet designs were not all categorically unsafe. The design used at Chernobyl was a problematic design, but still many layers of human error had to be involved to create the accident. Military reactor designs are generally less safe. Civilian designs were usually OK in the USSR.
In combination this made such reactors intrinsically unsafe compared to their western counterparts, especially the positive void coefficient which can't be found in any western reactors as far as I'm aware.
Not all Soviet designs were as unsafe as RMBK but most were less safe than the average western reactor.
The meltdowns at Fukushima would have been as bad as Chernobyl if the design was similar. And the Fukushima reactors used an old western design dating from roughly the Chernobyl era. The cause of the meltdowns(loss of power) was similar.
The major difference was that Fukushima had containment buildings, no graphite in the core to burn, and a reactor designed to become less critical as the water boils (void coefficient less than 1.0).
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Notice how reprocessing or fast breeders solve problems 1 and 4. As for 3 the US has never had an release of radioactivity to the environment from a nuclear reactor aboard a ship or submarine in several thousand years of operation time.
That's not correct, there have been several releases of radioactivity from US military vessels. This is all prior to the late 1980s, since the mid 1970s many controls and monitors were added to prevent releases. Personally I'd attribute this to lack of awareness rather than lack of budget. The Soviet program looks quite different. December 12, 1971, The USS Dace spilled 1,900 litres of radioactive coolant water in to…
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Editor here. These were originally written in English, so we have plans to translate to Russian, which might take a while since we only have one fully-qualified translator. Help is welcome! Shoot me an email (included in my profile).
Oh, interesting. Were the original interviews not done in Russian?