191–200 of 277 posts
I'm pro-nuclear, but trying to paint the anti-nuclear environmental movement as eugenicists is grasping.
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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.
Environmental groups fought it tooth and nail.
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Military reactors are different from civilian reactors in at least two ways: 1) military fuel would not be allowed in civilian hands, and 2) military reactors have essentially an infinite budget, and have few economic constraints. The challenges of using military reactors in other settings go far beyond questions of "political will"
I've also heard anecdotal accounts that military reactors are still maintenance nightmares, and their lack of public nuclear accidents is less due to doctrine and more to the fact that these reactors spend their life in a classified military environment floating in international water; AKA easy to cover up
The Russian reactors on the other hand… let’s just say a lot of those guys die of cancer.
They aren’t maintenance nightmares for technical reasons. More for regulatory reasons. Still, they always manage to get underway on time.
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Except they aren't cheaper than nuclear in any way. Nuclear power has a big cost to get started, it's a fact, but then a reactor, especially a modern one, can continue to function for nearly a century. If you factor that, the cost is risible given the benefit that nuclear power gives you. Talking about renewable, how much does it cost to remain without energy? We take it for granted, but it's not, especially these da…
It turns out this is not the case. Many nuclear reactors in the US have been shut down because they couldn't even make an operating profit. The remaining reactor at Three Mile Island was cash flow negative for the last six years it was in operation.
Also the main alternative to nuclear are fossil fuels, that have order of magnitude of cost higher than nuclear, only that it's not payed now but it will be payed by future generation: the cost of climate change, that cannot even be quantified (while the cost of nuclear, even if high, can!).
Lastly, fossil fuels are not only bad for the environment, but for the fact that oil companies are involved, and with their power they control the economy. Usually nuclear power plants are run by government own companies (and thus the country doesn't depend on others for the energy)
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.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Ukraine-planning...
"today’s so-called environmentalists" The nuclear industry had decades to fix its economic, safety and environmental issues but sat on its hands instead. If half of the subsidies they received over that time when into research we would have fixed the renewable storage problem a decade ago. There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades. Fission wa…
> There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades. This source says up to 4 billion years. Nuclear power is sustainable. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
This info is based on some projects for tech that hasn't yet proven to be economical at scale. In theory we could replace all reactors with breeders, develop a zero-carbon thorium fuel supply chain etc. but we haven't because it's expensive like hell, slow to commission and still not environmentally sustainable.
What's easier and cheaper to fix, all that or battery/storage technology?
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>The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl~ We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years, and you would cause less environment damage, and human deaths than we did by operating fossil fuel plants in 2021. There is no argument against chernobyl because chernobil is quite frankly irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for, and arguably…
After Chernobyl clouds containing radioactive material where blown westwards by the wind and eventually those clouds rained down over parts of Germany. To this day if you go out hunting for example wild boards in those areas they have to be tested for radioactivity before they can be processed further, since their diet mostly consists of mushrooms and plants that contain a lot of Caesium-137 from that rainfall back i…
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Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.
Fossil fuels are not on the table, IMHO, so there's no point in comparing to them at all. Sure, nuclear is CapEx heavy, with low OpEx. But storage and wind and solar have lower CapEx and OpEx. And they also scale much better, and are falling in cost, so when they need to be replaced, they will be replaced at even lower costs than their initial builds. And investing in the technology now only drives down future costs…
There is the point: fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear.
Renewable energy has their problem, and the problem is that not all country are like the US, i.e. a lot of space that is unused and can be used to put solar panels, wind turbines, or make dams, without anyone complaining. If you look at the European territory, it's mostly used, there is not a square centimeter of land unused. This is a problem.
Another problem of renewable energy is storage. How do you store all that amount of power to use it when the renewable energy production (that is depended on the weather that you can't control) is not available? It's a big deal. And you will likely always need fossil fuel power station ready to operate in case of necessity.
> We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10 replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper economic requisites.
I don't know if you are up to date, but we have also a semiconductor shortage. Guess what solar panel are made of? Semiconductors. How do you even imagine getting the material to produce all that panels in a short time? Not only that, but solar panel alone don't do anything, since they produce DC power: you also need inverters, that are other piece of electronics. Again an enormous quantity of electronic that this day is not available. And do you talk about storage, do you think that getting lithium is much simpler? And in the context of a probable (if not already in progress) commercial war with China, where do you produce them? How many years do you take to open up a plant to make semiconductors in the US or Europe? And where do you even get the raw material?
Yes, a nuclear reactor take a lot of materials to build, but with a few reactors you can make all the energy that you need. That is overall the materials that you need to produce the same amount of power are order of magnitude lower. Also, a nuclear reactor has a greater life expectancy than other renewable sources (except hydroelectric).
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> There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades. This source says up to 4 billion years. Nuclear power is sustainable. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
It is not sustainable. But it can be more so, under some optimistic, unrealistic scenarios. This info is based on some projects for tech that hasn't yet proven to be economical at scale. In theory we could replace all reactors with breeders, develop a zero-carbon thorium fuel supply chain etc. but we haven't because it's expensive like hell, slow to commission and still not environmentally sustainable. What's easier…
Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or maintenance of a nuclear reactor. (Neither Three Mi…
> Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. I imagine there's tons of stuff you're not allowed to talk about, but have you ever written down any stories in a book or blog or anything like that? I would love to learn more about your career, what you learned, saw, etc. etc. Thanks!
Yep.
> but have you ever written down any stories in a book or blog or anything like that?
Nope.
But thanks for asking — I appreciate the interest!