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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

#131

Post by makeitdouble »

Georgelemental wrote: post #50
locallost wrote: post #27

The article starts by praising the French nuclear program in the 70s. Yet, that same nuclear program is currently going through a complete debacle, failing to provide for its own country's needs, and is partially the reason prices are going into the stratosphere on the whole continent. If you can't factor in the reality of what is actually happening as we speak as a potential risk for your analysis, well... The Frenc…

France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was sabotaged.

Political incompetency should really be baked in any discussion about pushing more nuclear.

You can have miracle new reactor designs, but do you have a society that matches it and will properly manage the technology for the next 50 years ?

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#132

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

hef19898 wrote: post #63
Georgelemental wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was sabotaged.

Not sure how politicians are directly responsible for a Europe wide drought making it close to impissible to get enough cooling water to nuclear plants to producr anywhere near nominal capacity.

They are by building power plants without cooling towers. Problem is not enough water, but because water discharged back to river is too hot.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#133

Post by fi358 »

pfdietz wrote: post #103
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.

Finland is one of the worst places in the world for renewables. This means that any industry using significant amounts of energy is going to move away from Finland, once fossil fuels are no longer used.

Most of the electricity in Finland is not produced by using fossil fuels. For example during year 2020 14 % of the electricity in Finland was produced by fossil fuels.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#134

Post by chickenchicken »

pfdietz wrote: post #125
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.

Thanks for your service.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#135

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

> Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other.

Is it fearmongering when incidents actually happened and right now we have a country that could potentially have a reactor get destroyed by act of war ?

You seem to focus purely on the technical part, and swiping away the margin for human error, unpredicted issues, political incompetence, and straight hostility. Those are also part of the discussion.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#136

Post by delroth »

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.

In this specific case (regulations on the cooling water temperature) it's killing some fishes vs killing some birds. That seems very comparable to me.

Why wouldn't we require wind turbines to stop when birds are migrating to reduce their environmental externalities?

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#137

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

kingkawn wrote: post #28

The present day shelling of Zaporizhzhya is a sufficient argument alone to invest no further resources in the development of this technology and to remove it from the face of the earth.

And replace it with burning of wood, dumping glass panels full of cadmium and burying spent fiberglass in desert.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#138

Post by pdonis »

Arnt wrote: post #85
pdonis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety features remove the need for operators to take particular actions in the event of a problem, so "loss of brain accidents" are no longer possible. (Whether those designs can support the requirements for military use, which are quite different from those for civilian power generation, is a different question.) That said, civilian nuclear power, at least in the US, was…

Digressing, perhaps… do you know anything about why the passive designs weren't built? There are something like 500 nuclear reactors, of which approximately zero use entirely passive safety features. Not 250, not even 50.

> do you know anything about why the passive designs weren't built?

Because they're too recent. By the time these designs were developed, the nuclear industry in the US was basically dead, so there has been no real opportunity for them to be commercially deployed.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#139

Post by hef19898 »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #132
hef19898 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how politicians are directly responsible for a Europe wide drought making it close to impissible to get enough cooling water to nuclear plants to producr anywhere near nominal capacity.

They are by building power plants without cooling towers. Problem is not enough water, but because water discharged back to river is too hot.

I always liked simple answers to comokex questions like, e.g, nuclear power plant cooling. Especially when they come with pre defined scape goats.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#140

Post by Manuel_D »

hef19898 wrote: post #63
Georgelemental wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was sabotaged.

Not sure how politicians are directly responsible for a Europe wide drought making it close to impissible to get enough cooling water to nuclear plants to producr anywhere near nominal capacity.

It's not a question of enough cooling water. It's a problem of how much the plant is allowed to heat the river. Because apparently keeping a stretch of river below 28*C is more important than climate change.
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