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Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#121

Post by chickenchicken »

philipkglass wrote: post #91
tuatoru wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas. Yet all these materials are cheap.

The LD50 for arsenic in rats is 15 milligrams/kg: http://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Tabl... The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2 millicuries per kilogram: http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895 Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram ( https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19680020487 ), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms/kg for the LD50. Gram for gr…

Thanks for this insight and explanation.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#122

Post by desindol »

epistasis wrote: post #43
dundercoder wrote: post #6

I worked in commercial nuclear power for a while, including a stint at three mile island. The regulatory compliance burden alone, from the NRC and DOE, is crippling financially.

That seems to conflict with the low operating expenses of nuclear reactors. Once they are built, what is the crippling aspect?

low operating expenses over the whole lifetime of the plant including deconstruction or just the fun part?

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#123

Post by pfdietz »

fallingknife wrote: post #26
jmyeet wrote: post #13

I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the anti-environmentalist screed. For example: > The postwar American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenaics movement. and > Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its associations with Nazism, eug…

> The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl > Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off So let's not ignore Chernobyl. Let's say hypothetically that we build our entire power grid out of nuclear power plants that use the exact same design as the reactors at Chernobyl. Still better than using fossil fuels. And it's a stupid compa…

> Don't care because doesn't exist (yet).

A nuclear powered world economy also doesn't exist yet (it couldn't use today's burner reactors unless we have massively larger uranium supplies, such as seawater uranium extraction that doesn't exist yet; it could use breeder reactors but they also don't exist yet in a form even competitive with burner reactors.)

The "it doesn't exist yet" argument condemns nuclear even more than it does renewables.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#124

Post by credit_guy »

BMc2020 wrote: post #25
fundatus wrote: post #5

Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.

Shhh, don't disturb the pro-nuke narrative with 'facts'. Elsewhere in this thread they try to blame regulations. US regulations don't apply in China and Russia, but they can't make it economic either.

Pro-nuke here.

I'm happy with NRC. I think they are doing their job. I'd rather NRC be too conservative than have a Fukushima or Chernobyl event.

But nuclear is just technology. There is no fundamental reason for nuclear technology to not be 10 times or 100 times cheaper. In particular the naval nuclear reactors appear to be quite inexpensive. And keep in mind, they are designed to be able to work in conditions of combat (hopefully they won't need to). If someone were to just build them on land, they could be cheaper still.

I (along with almost all pro-nuke guys) am not pro-expensive-nukes. I'm pro-cheap-nukes. But refusing to even consider nukes is a perfect way to never get cheap nukes.

Oh, and by the way, I'm really happy that solar and wind are cheap and getting cheaper. Solar energy generation has increased by about 20% or more every year for the last decade (except for one year). I really think the trend will continue.

The idea that investing in nuclear technology is taking away money from renewables is just silly. In 2021 more than $100 billion were invested in renewables in the US. The investments in nuclear are simply insignificant compared to that.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#125

Post by pfdietz »

silexia wrote: post #2

Who really killed nuclear power? I bet if you traced all the financial donations to all the environmental groups and people who have opposed nuclear power, you will find a lot of oil dictatorships and oil companies. Follow the money...

Implicit in that paranoia is the assumption that environmental groups are what stopped nuclear. But that's really just a dubious right wing talking point. Nuclear appears to have shot itself in the foot all on its own.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#126

Post by Sporktacular »

jwie wrote: post #39

Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other. Most people just don’t know how safe nuclear power is. I worked on a nuclear reactor personally. We used to joke that the safest thing we had in the power plant was the radiation. I received less operational exposure in 6 years than typical nuclear medicine procedures create. The other source is entre…

Nuclear had decades to become affordable, safer and sustainable. Instead plants have remained hugely expensive and slow to commission, intrinsically safe reactors are still a pipe dream, the environmental impact of building plants and mining and refining uranium is still large when only 1% of it is used, thorium reactors are a rarity and there is only one dependable, permanent waste depot in operation.

Economics is nuclear's enemy, not environmentalists. Solving the energy storage issue is a hell of a lot easier than solving all the above. The greenies got it right, the future is in renewable sources.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#127

Post by fi358 »

epistasis wrote: post #104
fi358 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in countries like here in Finland, you get almost no energy from solar panels during winter months. 12 hours of storage to a solar array is not going to work at least here.

Here is what I suggested in my comment: > storage (hydro or battery), to geothermal, to advanced geothermal, to hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows what will be developed over the next few decades With storage on solar thrown in as only one option at the end. And though it will probably be a dominant solution because it will be by far the cheapest most locations, it won't work everywhere. So look to other tech…

At least battery storage seems to be unrealistic solution. The needed amount of energy storage for several months is enormous and in addition to that problem, batteries tend to self-discharge.

Geothermal energy and hydro storage are not without problems either. I am not sure about ammonia storage, but it would be interesting to see some calculations about the feasibility of storing so much energy by using hydro or ammonia.

Thanks to the local green party we are behind schedule in nuclear energy. They have dragged the process by years and also in practice forced us to have a new reactor type. In reality much better solution would have been at least two smaller and more traditional reactors (which would provide also more redundancy) than more experimental reactor which is also uncomfortably large. However the older nuclear reactors we have, have worked pretty well and are still producing energy cheaply and reliably unlike renewal energy.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#128

Post by nullc »

desindol wrote: post #116
nullc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... as if the alternative energy solutions don't harm wildlife (including solar and wind). Is this again an example of expecting nuclear to mitigate its externalities while ignoring them for everything else?

Ah yes, the strawman argument... possibility to kill the entire planet vs killing some birds.

kill the entire planet? From exceeding a delta-t of 2 degree C in their discharge water?

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#129

Post by chickenchicken »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #35
BMc2020 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shhh, don't disturb the pro-nuke narrative with 'facts'. Elsewhere in this thread they try to blame regulations. US regulations don't apply in China and Russia, but they can't make it economic either.

China is planning to build 150 reactors by 2035, and has not then doubled the nuclear share in a decade, so economic or not, there's evidently some appeal there.

Yeah and a multiple of that in renewables

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#130

Post by eric-hu »

qqqwerty wrote: post #108
alerighi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

This isn't about nuclear vs coal. It is about nuclear vs renewables. And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build. For every nuclear plant you build, we can build the exact same generation capabilities for about half the cost and it can be built in a quarter of the time[1]. That means that the renewable solution will have already mostly paid for itself before th…

From the article you quoted:

> In order to replace the two nuclear plants while the sun is down, the batteries would need to replicate two 1.117 GW power sources for 16 hours. The total energy storage capacity would be 39.3 GWh, after we add an extra 10% for safe measure.

Sorry, but no. This is a brittle system proposed. A 16 hour battery backup doesn't account for bad weather events like hurricanes, let alone more severe ones like the Texas power crisis.

Take a look at this diagram of power production during said Texas power crisis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/media...

Compare the area of the solar curve at the start and end of this 11 day window to what it is in the middle. There's a huge difference between how much solar was produced between good days and bad.

Now look at the nuclear production for this same time and tell me these two can be used equally well for base load power production.

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