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A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

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Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#151

Post by petre »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #21
thatcat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your cost analysis neglects replacement, disposal costs for batteries, long term costs of carbon emission, and coal flyash disposal. The only reason nuclear is losing to gas and coal is because the externalities of the mess they make are dumped on the public, whereas nuclear pollution and waste processing is heavily regulated.

Batteries can be recycled, nuclear waste is stockpiled with no permanent disposal or recycling plan in sight. Solar and wind, unsubsidized, with storage, are already cheaper than nuclear. Those costs will continue to plummet, especially as EV battery demand ramps (rapidly expanding battery manufacturing capacity). Nuclear lost because it’s too expensive, and has its own externalities to ignore (decommissioning, waste…

Most of this nuclear "waste" could be recycled as well by processing and further burning it in breeder reactors. Of course the processng equipment gets contaminated but that's life.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#152

Post by petre »

chongli wrote: post #59
ben-schaaf wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know others have addressed the dangers of this, but I had a little fun looking at the logistics. The UK alone produces 2Mt of radioactive waste[0] per year, ~9% is of "intermediate" level. Just sending those 18Mt into LEO would take 129,000 Saturn V launches per year. That's about one launch every 4 minutes. And LEO is not where we want to send anything. Lets assume a Trans-Lunar Injection is enough, bringing that…

Launching waste into space with a rocket is a silly idea. We don't really care if the waste gets damaged as long as it doesn't break up and make a mess. Why not build a giant railgun to launch it?

What if it fails and the waste falls back to Earth spreading over inhabited areas or agriculture/fishing grounds? It's a bad idea to begin with.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#153

Post by pfdietz »

bovine3dom wrote: post #118
pfdietz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is by no means the cheapest source of energy. That's the big problem it's facing: it has priced itself out of the market.

It hasn't priced itself out of the market - Governments insisting that it is many orders of magnitude safer [1] than any other form of power generation have unsurprisingly made it very expensive and over-engineered. Nuclear quite simply needs to be given its fair share of blood to be competitive - to get wind power down to the same level of safety we'd have to build robots to climb the turbines to maintain them. [1]…

The argument that governments aren't letting reactors melt down enough is a nonstarter. If nuclear proponents have to resort to that, you might as well give up.

I suggest instead pushing for designs that can achieve acceptable levels of safety at lower cost. In particular, molten salt designs, such as the one from Moltex, that allow the size of the containment building to be shrunk by a factor of five from that of an LWR (for a given power output). Moltex's design does not dissolve the fuel in the primary coolant and has other attractive features vs. other MSR designs.

Such designs are not on the market today, and will take time and money to bring to market. I think R&D on them is a good idea, and supporting that is a proper role for governments, just as it was for renewables, but they are still something of a longshot, given where the competition is likely to be in 20 years.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#154

Post by skywhopper »

beaconstudios wrote: post #30
toomuchtodo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries can be recycled, nuclear waste is stockpiled with no permanent disposal or recycling plan in sight. Solar and wind, unsubsidized, with storage, are already cheaper than nuclear. Those costs will continue to plummet, especially as EV battery demand ramps (rapidly expanding battery manufacturing capacity). Nuclear lost because it’s too expensive, and has its own externalities to ignore (decommissioning, waste…

this might sound silly (and it probably is), but I don't understand why we don't build a hulking great cannon and shoot our nuclear waste into space.

One answer is that it probably isn’t possible to do what you say, but if it were the failure states are wildly unacceptable. Any “cannon” (or rail gun) capable of accelerating an object to escape velocity from the surface would likely burn the object up during its flight through the atmosphere, spreading its radioactive contents into the air to float around as low level global fallout for decades.

But if instead you just launched it into space on a rocket... well what happens when a launch fails and the rocket blows up on the launch pad? If you’re lucky, you mark a few square miles as no-go zones and then move on to the next launch pad? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable solution.

One of my favorite ideas is to encase the waste into giant glass blocks, and build pyramids in the desert... but I doubt that’s very practical either.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#155

Post by pfdietz »

ThomPete wrote: post #144
PavlovsCat wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible. Well, if that "counts", then solar power will become totally free and have a net positive environmental impact, we'll just plant some nanobots that grow and repair solar panels inside a marked area, and can be scooped up should we need them elsewhere, hence "100% free once we perfected them". They'll smell like vanilla, and ch…

You can say the same about solar which needs fuelcell technology we dont have. Nuclear waste is not problems that we have no idea to solve.

Solar doesn't need fuel cells.

Fuel cells are a high capital cost solution to the problem of turning hydrogen into electricity, at higher efficiency. That's not what solar or wind need -- they need low capital cost, mediocre efficiency backup sources.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#156

Post by pfdietz »

ouid wrote: post #13

Just a nitpick, neutrons aren't blasted into the nuclei of fissile isotopes. The faster a neutron is going, the less likely it is to cause fission. You want slow neutrons.

Indeed. In a thermal reactor, the energy of the neutrons is moderated down to the reactor operating temperature, and is typically a few tens of milli-electron volts (some tens of millions of times less energetic than when they were produced). These slow neutrons do impart a lot of energy when they are absorbed into a nucleus, but that's because of their binding energy into that nucleus. Due to nuclear shell effects, they add slightly more energy to nuclei with an odd number of neutrons, which is one reason why 235U can be fissioned with thermal neutrons and 238U cannot.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#157

Post by DennisP »

Jodlenisse wrote: post #148

It helps to be born after 1986.

I lived in Germany in 1986. For over half a year we were told to avoid fresh milk and produce and avoid walking barefoot on grass.

But now I know that Chernobyl was a ridiculously poor design that lacked a containment dome. If you want to build another Chernobyl I'll fight you, but if you want to build a modern plant or research MSRs I'm all for it, because climate change is set to do way worse than anything nuclear has ever done, Chernobyl included.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#158

Post by pfdietz »

Spooky23 wrote: post #107
toomuchtodo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is nuclear being expensive political? It is fundementally untenable as a commercial enterprise when compared to natural gas, solar, and wind. 90-95% of all new generation coming online each year are renewables in the US. Renewables cost continues to decline year over year, speeding its uptake. I cannot fathom how one would think nuclear can compete at all in such an environment. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/…

You use it as baseload to replace coal. The problem with renewables is the variability, which would lead to overcapacity or other issues as it scales up.

When we say a source is "baseload", we're not saying something good about it. What that means is that source's business case depends on being able to sell its output most of the time. It's a word describing economic inflexibility.

There is no reason why a grid needs any baseload sources whatsoever.

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#159

Post by throw2016 »

The recent piece by HCN on our nuclear past stands in sharp contrast. [1] Anyone reading that, environmentalists or not, will have reason for extreme concern and skepticism about a single generations ability to manage consequences that can last thousands of years.

[1] https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.21/nuclear-energy-theres-no-ea...

Re: A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

#160

Post by pfdietz »

pdonis wrote: post #16
mimixco wrote: post #2

No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas). When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense. Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extra…

> we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Sure we do: reprocess it, like every country except the US that uses nuclear power does. The only reason the US doesn't is stupid politics.

Almost no one reprocesses, because it doesn't make economic sense at current U prices. Even the french have admitted this.

The US decision to not get the government pushing reprocessing was the correct one. You will notice that after Reagan lifted Carter's ban on reprocessing, no commercial firms here jumped into the market. That's because it's not economically justified.

I don't think burying waste anytime soon at Yucca Mountain is economically justified either, by the way.

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