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The Nuclear Option

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Re: The Nuclear Option

#181

Post by kortilla »

205guy wrote: post #178
kortilla wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Politicians won't back nuclear because of the risk of accident, thus giving legitimacy to the risk and the public's fears. No, that’s not the case. Politicians won’t back it because of their perceived risk based on their own ignorance. Or, even if they aren’t ignorant, they are focused more on staying in office rather than helping humanity so they don’t take up any projects that the ignorant public might pitchfork a…

See my point about realpolitik above. Politicians more or less reflect the people, for better or for worse. Politicians are also the leaders and deciders, if not them, who else? There is a healthy nuclear industry, lobby, and research, so it's not like nuclear is unfairly excluded from the solutions table. As others have pointed out, cost overruns have sunk many modern nuclear projects. > real understanding/evidence…

The argument is that there are no rational reasons for humans not to support nuclear. The only reason it’s “not up to the task” is because humans as a group are behaving incredibly stupidly by ignoring the numbers and murdering people with coal while concern trolling an energy that kills fewer people than your standard annual mass shootings.

So the rational arguments are everywhere. The problem is that people want to clutch onto their irrational fear and believe in eithe the fantasy of non existent climate change or the fantasy of solar/wind storage becoming feasible in 10 years or less.

In other words, as a technical solution there isn’t anything nearly as good. There are no rational arguments against that. It’s arguing with anti-vaxers at this point.

As an actual solution, well how do we deal with the anti-vaxer problem? The same could be applied there.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#182

Post by jabl »

sasavilic wrote: post #170
jabl wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially. After a few hundred years, most of it is gone, although there is of course the danger due to the chemical toxicity, just like any other heavy metal deposit. Obsessing over what could happen if somebody digs it up after 10000 years is not anchored in reality.

> The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially True, but it is still question of the half-life (i.e. plutonium) > Obsessing over what could happen if somebody digs it up after 10000 years is not anchored in reality. It is a reasonable concern, because we have never before in our history produced such toxic waste that lives so long. I don't know about you, but I do hope that Homo sapiens will survive next 10k…

> > The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially

> True, but it is still question of the half-life (i.e. plutonium)

To expand my statement, yes, spent fuel is a mix of different isotopes, some stable, and others unstable with different half-lives. The point being, if something is super-radioactive, then by definition it has a short half-life. And conversely, if something has a long half-live, it's per definition not as radioactive has something with a short half-life.

Thus, after 10k years, what is left is not that radioactive (to be more specific, after 10k years with a once-through cycle, spent fuel will have a radio-toxicity about 20 times that of natural uranium ore. Now, I'm not suggesting you should grind it into dust and sprinkle on your cheerios in the morning. But it's not any kind of civilization-ending toxicity either.

The idea that a future civilization will have the know-how to mine stuff 1 km underground, but somehow they have no clue about chemical or radio-toxicity just seems so absurd to me.

> It is a reasonable concern, because we have never before in our history produced such toxic waste that lives so long.

Citation needed. My guess would be that we have produced an unfortunately large amount of toxic waste, but the vast vast majority of that is not radioactive, and will thus never decay. Dig it up a million years from now, and it will be as toxic as it is today. The incredible energy density of nuclear fuel means that, in the end, the amount of nuclear waste is very small.

> I don't know about you, but I do hope that Homo sapiens will survive next 10k years.

I hope so too. In my mind, however, climate change, biodiversity loss, topsoil loss etc. rate far far higher as risk factors than a comparatively small amount of nuclear waste. In fact, by not deploying nuclear due to risks associated with nuclear waste, we significantly reduce our chances of dealing effectively with climate change, a much higher risk.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#183

Post by rjf72 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #163
rjf72 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't require specific geography. You can create entirely artificial pump systems isolated from any natural water. These are called closed loop systems. You could create an closed loop pumped hydroeletric system in the middle of the Sahara if so desired. Incidentally you could power the entire world with a solar area taking up a single digit percent of the Sahara. These haven't been actively developed in the pas…

The Sahara-global-solar-facility scale starts bumping up a lot when you factor in realities. PV efficiency, spacing factors, panel replacement cycles, storage requirements, the fact that we're looking at total energy use and not just electricity, first-world rather than third-world per-capita use rates (presuming we're not going to freeze the entire world at its present state of energy consumption), and projected pop…

I worked out the numbers several years back and it was around 5%. Efficiency improvements since then should have improved this a fair amount. Even if you bump it up by an order of magnitude it's still rather remarkable how easily we could power the entire world on solar alone.

However, I completely agree on the real issue being one of longterm consumption. I would say this is something that's regularly ignored. The developing world starting to consume developed world electricity/capita alongside increasing world population is easily going to increase energy consumption by some orders of magnitude in the foreseeable future.

This poses unique challenges few are considering. For instance nuclear also runs into problems here with resource availability. The technology is already rather cost prohibitive and for future energy needs if it became a primary source you'd absolutely need to move to breeder reactors alongside saltwater uranium extraction which would both push the prices up significantly higher than even present. High energy demands alongside high energy prices might make the production owners/shareholders happy, but not much of anybody else.

In any case sooner or later we'll end up relying on solar simply because nothing else can compete on gross energy availability. The sun's a fusion reactor that could fit about 1.3 million Earths inside of it. That enables practically unlimited power out there just waiting to be harnessed one way or the other.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#184

Post by pfdietz »

kortilla wrote: post #181
205guy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my point about realpolitik above. Politicians more or less reflect the people, for better or for worse. Politicians are also the leaders and deciders, if not them, who else? There is a healthy nuclear industry, lobby, and research, so it's not like nuclear is unfairly excluded from the solutions table. As others have pointed out, cost overruns have sunk many modern nuclear projects. > real understanding/evidence…

The argument is that there are no rational reasons for humans not to support nuclear. The only reason it’s “not up to the task” is because humans as a group are behaving incredibly stupidly by ignoring the numbers and murdering people with coal while concern trolling an energy that kills fewer people than your standard annual mass shootings. So the rational arguments are everywhere. The problem is that people want to…

But there's a very rational reason to not support nuclear: it's too expensive.

I used to support nuclear, but this argument against it has become too strong.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#185

Post by pfdietz »

kortilla wrote: post #99
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Safer, modern” plants in the US, the UK, and China are being scrapped because they’re not affordable. Solar, wind, and storage are already cheaper than nuclear. So why build nuclear?

No, storage is not cheaper. That’s a fantasy. If it were true they would be rapidly displacing all energy production in the US.

He was saying that renewables + batteries are cheaper than building new nuclear powerplants. This doesn't imply new renewables + batteries would be cheaper than continuing to operate existing power plants (most of which are not nuclear, and all of which have their capital cost sunk so it shouldn't be counted), which would be required for your inference of "rapidly displacing all energy production in the US".

Re: The Nuclear Option

#186

Post by pfdietz »

rurounijones wrote: post #175
dv_dt wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It is not economical to build them" strikes me as a pretty crazy position to take. Why, no matter what resources you allocate financially, if you have X dollars, you can do more and sooner with X building renewable sources than if you split it between renewables and nuclear.

Because that is based on the assumption that renewables and no nuclear is viable and going to work based on advances in technology. I think there is enough debate in this thread to illustrate why that is not a universal position. This comment explains it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19169073

It's difficult to see how nuclear can fit in, even if renewables aren't directly covering everything.

Renewables will be intermittent, which means as they build out they will often crash the price of electrical power. Nuclear cannot do well in that environment, since it cannot dispatch economically. Its costs are largely fixed, and it depends on selling power at a good price averaged over the large fraction of time it needs to be operating. But renewables slash the price it can get much of the time, even if they cannot cover everything.

If nuclear is reduced to covering (say) 20% of the time cheap renewables are not available, it's a dead technology. Something else, like using hydrogen produced from renewables during their high output times, will be used instead.

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