Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically, yes. We have good alternatives now, though. What’s stopping us moving off carbon fuel is not the viability of alternatives.
a 100% wind solar storage grid really isn't viable.
Depends on transport.
The Radiation Exposure Lie
121–130 of 144 posts
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#122> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree. I know I may be overreacting, but when the dentists try to convince me that the annual x-ray of my family members is the same as being outside in the sun for a whole day, I try to explain it with a similar analogy; getting exposed to small amounts of x-r…
The ADA says annual X-rays are not best practice - perhaps ask your dentist why they don’t follow ADA guidelines?
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#123From the first hand: I was in the air base service regiment, Ovruch ( 30 km from reactor ), 1 year in service at the time of disaster.
The average numbers have a little sense. By our measurements, it was't an "even" distribution, but some "hot spots" that had 10x time radiation level than surrounding territory.
The article focuses on cancer, but for me and my buddies, the worst was an impact on immune system. In the six months after disaster, the healthy boy before, I got: pneumonia, chicken pox ( and 2 more with me ), furunculosis ( the whole company got it as well ), and endless flu/fevers. The weak immune continued for about 10 years.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: if we had invested in renewable energy resources like solar and wind to begin with, we wouldn't have needed (as much) assistance from nuclear, coal, oil, and gas.
I didn't miss that at all! I think we should definitely build more solar and wind. I also think we should build more nuclear. I've seen estimations saying we could supply the current grid demands with renewables in about 10 years time if we start building now. Thing is, in ten years, power demand will have doubled. So we should build renewables and nuclear. Any other plan will end up using coal oil and gas.
I think you missed my point, which is that if we had invested early on (think 1970s) in wind and solar, by today they would be at a capacity such that we would need far less nuclear, coal, oil, and gas than we do currently.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand the question. It's always cheaper.
What are you smoking?? Storage is more expensive than generation. Always. We see some storage on the grid because storage is fast. Batteries can respond to load changes a lot faster than anything else. Demand goes up, the batteries are drawn down while cheaper generators are spun up. A few places use pumped hydro for the same purpose, but that's very situational.
I'm just smoking the math, man. LCOE for renewables plus necessary battery storage to level out those renewables is way cheaper than nuclear. If you don't believe me, go find some comparisons.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand the question. It's always cheaper.
No it isn't. Storage capacity for energy is expensive, if you want to have a grid that is largely dependent on intermittent sources and still have a stable grid providing power at all times you need large amounts of storage as well as generating capacity. For example if nuclear costs 1bn for a GW and solar+wind costs 0.6bn but you need to also install 0.5bn of storage to make the grid reliable to the safety margin yo…
It's more like 1 billion per GW versus 300 million per GW including the batteries. I'm sorry, it's just not close.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is much, much cheaper than nuclear at today's prices.
Nuclear is expensive because nuclear is defined as expensive. The problem lies with the standard of As Low As Reasonably Achievable. If you had reasonably priced nuclear power you could add more safety. Thus you have to add more safety. Thus you no longer have reasonably priced nuclear power. And, when it comes to power it's a totally wrong standard. You should not be looking to minimize individual technology risk, y…
If I'm making a decision about what generation capacity to build next, I can't change the definitions, and renewables are already the cheapest option. The only reason you're seeing data centers get natural gas is because they are mobile units that don't require permitting. That's not an economic problem, it's a regulatory problem, but it's a pretty easy one to fix in comparison to the national level nuclear regulatory problem in basically every developed country.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#128> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree. Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data. The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data. There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings. It…
in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this. so either low doses cause no harm or cause such minimal harm as to be safely disregarded. luckily the government is moving away from your position: https://www.eenews.net/articles/nrc-considers-eliminating-ha... not having cheaper nuclear energy imposes a far greater cost on society.
There is a safe radiation dose, because all living beings concentrate in them several radioactive isotopes (14C, 40K, 48Ca), so they are more radioactive than the environment.
Also, for example I have a dental bridge made of platinum-gold alloy and dental crowns made of zirconia ceramic.
Platinum is one of the most radioactive natural elements after uranium and thorium, while any piece of zirconia also contains radioactive isotopes of zirconium and hafnium.
Despite this, the people who wear platinum jewelry are not worried (though perhaps that is due more to ignorance than to rational risk assessment, since those who sell platinum jewelry do not advertise them as being radioactive).
Because the living beings have evolved in a radioactive environment (and the radioactivity of the environment was many times higher in the past, before most of the potassium 40 decayed) all have mechanisms for repairing the damage caused by radiation.
The efficiency of the repair mechanisms vary a lot between different living beings, but all of them can withstand the relatively low radioactivity levels of most environments on Earth.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory. But in fact, attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates, and the supposed benefits of nuclear power end up being delayed by many years and in many cases decades. The effect of trying and failing to build nuclear power plants on time and on budget uses up many billions in capital that could've been applied to reliable delivery of renewables. Even the supposedly effic…
> attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates Largely due to the costs of complying with draconian regulatory regimes.
I know a thing or two about project management and I can tell you that the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver on de-risking nuclear reactor construction projects. Building modules offsite seems like a good idea on the surface but the problem is that if they're delivered out of order or if they need rework you've made the on-site construction problem 3X harder and more expensive.
You might be thinking "But China!" China also over developed a number of ghost cities full of empty apartment towers so take their claims of an efficient nuclear power construction project with a grain of salt. Even in China, solar and wind projects come online faster, at a lower cost per kilowatt hour, and the projects are completed on time.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#130This is an intelligent enough group that I'll throw out something that's been bugging me for quite a while and this makes me question it even more:
Did the radium girls actually die of radiation?
Radium is a row 7 element, AFIAK everything in row 7 is quite toxic. Radium is below calcium in the periodic table. Thus, the body is going to put it in bones. And we saw horrors in their bones. Did it kill via radiation or via being toxic?