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Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

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Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#21

Post by jagermo »

daneel_w wrote: post #16

In Europe everyone knows that. Even the craziest of our "greens" who insist on complete domestic decommissioning know it. The reason a few European countries are shutting their nuclear power plants down isn't because they think they are unsustainable, but because they fear they may be targeted and attacked. They currently view them as the combination of a sitting duck and a powder keg.

Plus, you know, storing the waste for thousands of years without a good place to do so. Payed for by the public.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#22

Post by adrianN »

purerandomness wrote: post #18
zeryx wrote: post #9

It's incredibly frusturating that this isn't part of the public discourse, where are the pro-nuclear candidates? Which parties are pro-nuclear?

It was for decades, there simply isn't anything new to discuss. We still have no solution a) where to put nuclear waste, and b) how to communicate to civilizations for the next 25000-50000 years what kind of waste that is. In Germany, the ongoing search for a permanent waste repository is going on for decades now. Funnily enough, this taxpayer's money is never calculated into the total cost of operating nuclear plant…

You'd put your waste in a breeder reactor until it has turned into short-lived isotopes that you only have to worry about for a few hundred years. Without breeder reactors we probably wouldn't have enough fuel anyway.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#23

Post by xyzzyz »

dr_orpheus wrote: post #13

"However, billion-year sustainability does require advances in seawater uranium extraction..." This seems like a HUGE understatement. The calculations for the billion-year sustainability basically assume we have extracted every single bit of uranium from seawater. We have demonstrated extracting uranium from seawater [0] using plastic fibers with a compound that attracts the uranium+oxygen ions. But this would basica…

> But this would basically require pumping all of the worlds oceans through these fibers and continually extracting.

Yes, and? What’s the problem here? Billion years is a plenty of time to pump all ocean water through filters. The crucial fact here is that you only need to pump through and filter as much as you need, which is much less than millions of tons of total uranium in seawater.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#24

Post by blendergeek »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #6

1) there are no working thorium reactors 2) breeder reactors are hazardous 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this. The depressing truth is this shows that current uranium oxide reserves and nuclear tech could supply global energy needs for only 6 years.

> 1) there are no working thorium reactors

This will likely soon change.

> 2) breeder reactors are hazardous

France seems to use them safely.

> 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist

It will once we use breeder reactors. The reason seawater extraction doesn't exist is that it isn't economical. With breeder reactors, the calculus would change.

> 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this.

It would produce significantly more than it consumes.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#25

Post by Ottolay »

mikepurvis wrote: post #7

Aren't breeder reactors mostly still on the drawing board? I get that they're very promising, but my understanding is that there remain some non-trivial issues to work out around corrosion and so on. Anyway, I'm totally a believer in nuclear power for a greener future (yay Michael Schellenberger), but we need to keep these discussions honest: the path forward is to right now be building hundreds of copy-paste instanc…

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

Japan and India also have them.

The problem seems to be that at least the Sodium type are more expensive to operate than traditional nuclear plants, so even though the technology has been around for a while, no countries are building very many of them.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#26

Post by xyzzyz »

jagermo wrote: post #21
daneel_w wrote: post #16

In Europe everyone knows that. Even the craziest of our "greens" who insist on complete domestic decommissioning know it. The reason a few European countries are shutting their nuclear power plants down isn't because they think they are unsustainable, but because they fear they may be targeted and attacked. They currently view them as the combination of a sitting duck and a powder keg.

Plus, you know, storing the waste for thousands of years without a good place to do so. Payed for by the public.

We have good places to do so, it’s just they never are good enough to antinuclear activists.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#27

Post by cedilla »

Nuclear energy is sustainable only with technology we don't have yet. All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades.

And the sea water plan relies on technology that has been shown to be theoretically possible but not yet shown to be remotely feasible. At the proposed scale of kilotons per year, this would require filtering hundreds of billions of tons of sea water every year, even if we disregard the fact that most seawater isn't easily accesible.

But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late. Even if we managed to build nuclear reactors faster than at any other time in history, we would be far too late to stop climate change.

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#28

Post by ZeroGravitas »

nine_k wrote: post #15
dr_orpheus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I totally understand your point here. How did 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green? And we as of yet have not changed to 100% nuclear and/or recyclable and don't have the technology yet to achieve that goal of nuclear energy for "4 billion years"

It'd be pretty hard to advance the civilization from coal-based energy straight into nuclear / solar, without all the carbohydrates-powered cars, trucks, and airplanes in the meantime.

Has anyone actually looked into this in depth? It feels like a cheap throwaway line that you can use against new tech that's not really caught on yet, but as we're here in 2021 with EVs and nuclear power and wind turbines etc., what was actually stopping us getting there faster if we weren't distracted by oil? (either it magically didn't exist or somehow even more magically people succesfully priced in the carbon from the start).

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#29

Post by johnchristopher »

rootsudo wrote: post #4

It's amazing how gasoline itself was only used from 1892 to current time. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/history-of-gaso... So imagine 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green and change to an energy source for "4 billion years." That's so cool, and puts alot of conversation about environmentalism into prospective.

> So imagine 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green and change to an energy source for "4 billion years."

Oil washing, interesting.

It's not like we decided 150 year ago for a clear path from coal to oil to nuclear, thinking "let us bootstrap nuclear with oil until we either run out of oil or alter the planet too much".

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#30

Post by fsflover »

jagermo wrote: post #21
daneel_w wrote: post #16

In Europe everyone knows that. Even the craziest of our "greens" who insist on complete domestic decommissioning know it. The reason a few European countries are shutting their nuclear power plants down isn't because they think they are unsustainable, but because they fear they may be targeted and attacked. They currently view them as the combination of a sitting duck and a powder keg.

Plus, you know, storing the waste for thousands of years without a good place to do so. Payed for by the public.

So you care about a thousand-year problem but forget about the 50-year problem (climate change).
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