Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 357 posts

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#151

Post by Moldoteck »

_ph_ wrote: post #92
Scarblac wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

61.5% sounds like a lot, but how much electricity is needed to replace everything that fossil fuel is now used for? I think it needs to increase to 400% or so to do that.

Somewhere between 2-3x the electricity consumed right now (which is way down from the peak several years ago as efficiency increases, e.g. LEDs instead of light bulbs etc.). It would be crazy expensive to build nuclear reactors to produce so much electricity, with renewables it is still quite a task, but a much more manageable one.

in fact for germany building a similar renewable output will be much more expensive. Don't forget about transmission and balancing. Needless to say Germany doesn't have an actual plan to ditch gas, even h2-ready plants will either use a mix with gas(most probably) or pure h2(if it'll even be deployed) will still have huge NOx emissions

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#152

Post by Moldoteck »

Kon5ole wrote: post #3

Are the costs of this 13 years and counting expense tab added to the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power plants in any way? Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions are not made from overly optimistic numbers.

is it included in case of hydro dam accidents? not quite. Because these are accidents, these don't participate in providing electricity

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#153

Post by Krasnol »

vkou wrote: post #43
Krasnol wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan has 34 000km (21 126 miles) of coastline. They import about 90% of its energy requirements. This includes nuclear fuel. So this is far away from "perfect" if you can get wind and sun without having to import it.

> This includes nuclear fuel. Nuclear fuel is both relatively plentiful, and can be sourced from a multitude of countries, both Eastern, Western, and, most importantly, unaligned. A lot of countries have economically viable (for power generation) uranium reserves, but do not exploit them because global prices for it are so low . It differs significantly from oil in this respect.

This is so weird because despite being so plentiful, the EU has still to throw money at Russia for all kinds of stuff related to nuclear energy. Imagine that: we have all kinds of sanctions on Russia here in the EU. The tone is aggressive. There is fear of a Russian invasion into EU countries, and we still have to get that stuff from Russia.

So it seems not to be such an easy solution.

It gets even worse for poor countries which jumped on the Rosatom train being fully dependent on Rosatom tech, fuel, personal.

Even if it wouldn't be for that, it's far away from the availability of sun or wind.

Here is a nice read on the topic:

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/04/16/russia-is-earning-b...

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#154

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

Moldoteck wrote: post #149
legulere wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear was replaced by renewables, not by coal: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschla... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_generati... A point you certainly can argue about, is that coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now. For gas use electricity production is just a minor use. Most gas is consumed by industry and for heati…

it was replaced by coal,gas and exports. With nuclear, much less of them would have been used, as simple as that

The nuclear exit began in earnest in 2011.

Lets have a look at how the German electricity production has shifted over the years:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...

- Fossil gas: 2011 -> 2023 = stable.

- Coal: 2011 -> 2023 = large reduction

At the height of the energy crisis when half the French nuclear fleet was off line due to corrosion issues.

Germany temporarily reopened a few mothballed coal power plants to keep the lights on in France.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#155

Post by zdragnar »

Kon5ole wrote: post #140
bell-cot wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume that the folks building the barrels know about the embrittlement, and have both a decent budget and some experienced engineers to mitigate the problem. Also note my phrase "bury them". Radwaste is not some magical Sealed Evil in a Can. If bound in compounds with substantially higher density that the ocean sediments, and emplaced a few tens of meters below the sea floor, then gravity will quite strongly discour…

Four decades of studies by experienced engineers and a very decent budget to figure out how to store US nuclear waste has resulted in 0 solutions so far. I think we can safely assume that dumping it at sea is not an option.

We have solutions in the US, but politicians keep playing games. Yucca mountain has been authorized and de-authorized back and forth for decades. It isn't an engineering problem at all.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#156

Post by Moldoteck »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #18
Filligree wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the existence of coal power proves that releasing small amounts of radiation is fine, really. So we should be able to build a lot more nuclear power plants; it would take a lot of accidents like these to match the releases from coal.

The difference is the cost coming from handling it. The latest figure on the cost to handle Fukushima is $190B from 2016. The great thing today is that we don't need to accept radioactive releases from either nuclear power or coal. Simply build the cheap scalable option instead: renewables.

you replace nuclear waste (that can be reduced with purex or reused with fast reactors) with non recyclable toxic renewable waste in much greater quantities For accidents - just need to build newer reactor models. ap1000 is a marvel of engineering

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#157

Post by Moldoteck »

bell-cot wrote: post #27
Kon5ole wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do. This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.

> ...centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what... OR, you put the nasty and long-lived radwaste into (say) lead barrels, and bury those below some nice, deep, easily-monitored ocean trench. Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up. And if the effort needed to intentionally do so would be greater than the effort to brew their own fresh radwaste, then nobody will bother trying that, either.

why bury precious fuel? Use purex or fast reactors, vitrify rest, put in casks and deal with it at least till transmutation research advances

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#158

Post by Moldoteck »

pfdietz wrote: post #14
elzbardico wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that their system cost is prohibitive in the real world? The fact that we don’t fucking have the slightest idea of how to deal with recycling that stuff on their EOL? Or would be the fact that mining cobalt and lithium in the required quantities to indulge on the fantasy of a solar/wind based grid would poison an inordinate portion of our environment? Or would it be the fact that every single fucking country…

You provide excellent examples of the bogosity of the arguments. Let me demolish them in turn. 1) System cost Sure, it's high. That's because we spend huge amounts of money on energy. ANY system to replace fossil fuels will be expensive, in the trillions of dollars. But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is much more expensive than renewables. 2) R…

nuclear is not much more expensive, it's cheaper. It's just harder to scale If the waste is your concern - nuclear is better. And no, you can't just bury renewable waste, it too contains forever toxic materials that can be dispersed in soil and water. Amount of mined stuff- nuclear is better, amount of land used- nuclear is better No matter how you turn it, renewables were and will be more expensive for germany https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-rejigs-sprea...

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#159

Post by exe34 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #142
exe34 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like playing with fire Much safer to burn the rest of the planet instead.

That's going to happen anyway. We're already locked in. No amount of nuclear we can build can reverse that in time. We're just adding more risks to the mix. And externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.

I love it, we went from "it's impossible" to "it's not happening", to "it's happening but it's too early to waste money on it", to "it's happening but it's too late".

> externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.

is this the "nuclear would take 20 years" we've been hearing for the last 60?

[0] https://youtu.be/nSXIetP5iak?si=us7OuYwGLSrU-uod

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#160

Post by Moldoteck »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #154
Moldoteck wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was replaced by coal,gas and exports. With nuclear, much less of them would have been used, as simple as that

The nuclear exit began in earnest in 2011. Lets have a look at how the German electricity production has shifted over the years: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p... - Fossil gas: 2011 -> 2023 = stable. - Coal: 2011 -> 2023 = large reduction At the height of the energy crisis when half the French nuclear fleet was off line due to corrosion issues. Germany temporarily reopened a few mothball…

Man I know this. But the simple undeniable fact is - if nuclear was kept on - even less gas and coal would have been used, it's an obvious thing. Renewables did help ditching some of fossil generation, but with nuclear it would have been even more
Post reply on HN