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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

#201

Post by ThomPete »

pfdietz wrote: post #175
ThomPete wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if they cant get that then they will never be a baseline energy source as you cant count on them, so keep dreaming.

They can, when teamed with dispatchable sources, destroy the economic case for expensive baseload sources. This is why you're not seeing new nuclear plants much in the west. The decision makers know they face huge risk from future cost declines of renewables which, combined with gas, would leave those reactors unable to amortize their construction, financing, and fixed operating costs. There are other solutions for l…

I don't see nuclear plants much in the west because of political opposition and public ignorance nothing else.

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

#202

Post by ThomPete »

Spooky23 wrote: post #169
pfdietz wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not good or bad, it’s just the nature of the beast. The nature of a nuclear plant is that it is incredibly capital intensive, and needs to operate at capacity to work financially. Solar is interesting because it’s peak output aligns with peak demand. Your solar farm isn’t going to do much for you st night, but that’s ok because you don’t need the power!

In what world do you not need power at night? That's the most absurd claim I have heard in a long time.

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

#203

Post by ThomPete »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #196
ThomPete wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was responding to the comment not the article

> So, where's this new generation? What demonstrates their love? Show me pictures of a dozen, or it didn't happen. That's the point of the comment. "Nuclear had it's chance" is what you latched onto, concluding with "The environmentalist not rationality kille nuclear". So I guess you agree, the title is BS.

I don't care about the title. I care about the claim that nuclear had it's chance which anyone who knows their history know isn't true whatso ever.

Again solar has 1% of the worlds energy covered that's it. This is with all the bells and whistle and political support and economic investments.

Nuclear will EVEN without that deliver way more energy, much more stable, in abundance form and scaleable plus it's safe and greener than even solar.

Claiming it had it's time is ideologically blind in a way only people who listen too much to politicians like to think.

Call me when sun is used for most of the tranportation industry and for large constructions etc. Call me when the poor countries can solve the problems nature provides via solar.

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

#204

Post by pvaldes »

eseehausen wrote: post #33
beaconstudios wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because we already know how to store it for thousands of years with minimal leakage without creating a contraption that could lead to nuclear waste raining down on our heads.

To be fair, we already know how to store it with minimal leakage for thousands of years, but the tentation to just dump it in the Mediterranean (1980's), Somalia (1980-90's), seed it over Irak (Gulf's war) or leak it into the Japanese Sea (2011-17) is irresistible.

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

#205

Post by Spooky23 »

ThomPete wrote: post #202
Spooky23 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not good or bad, it’s just the nature of the beast. The nature of a nuclear plant is that it is incredibly capital intensive, and needs to operate at capacity to work financially. Solar is interesting because it’s peak output aligns with peak demand. Your solar farm isn’t going to do much for you st night, but that’s ok because you don’t need the power!

In what world do you not need power at night? That's the most absurd claim I have heard in a long time.

Peak load is aligned with sunlight.

Depending on where you live, many of the on-demand power generators like gas and solar farms are idle.

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

#206

Post by pdonis »

pfdietz wrote: post #160
pdonis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Y…

> The US decision to not get the government pushing reprocessing was the correct one.

Not in context, because the context was that that decision was part of a general policy on the government's part to kill nuclear energy. If the government had wanted to help nuclear energy, it would have said, sure, reprocess if you want to, as long as you're willing to deal with whatever the economics of it turn out to be. (In the 1970's, when the Carter administration made the decision, uranium mining was considerably more expensive than it is now, so reprocessing might well have made economic sense then, even if it doesn't now.)

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

#207

Post by pvaldes »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #166
pvaldes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll have to pack it very carefully in any case. Perhaps we should assume that this will happen and work with that scenery in mind. The concept of a fire resistant box is not new at a smaller scale; We can vitrify the less dangerous waste and store the crystal in steel containers. Then we could theoretically design explosion-proof containers for it with some outer sacrificial disposable layers made of a plastic clay…

There’s some more weight.

Is much worse than that :-). The "space solution" can be split in three different possibilities. I will name the first "The slingshoot"

We have succesfully used a "Slingshoot" approach to put heavy things up to 100t in the space many times. Hubble telescope (12t) or the orbiter from the space shuttle (100t) fall in this category.

We could split our waste in chunks of 500Kg, pack it really well and just put it in an orbiter; the problem is that we can't go really far with this system (around 500 Km or so). We just will put the waste in a low orbit where things can fall again into the earth sonner or later. We had the Thiangong-1 case in 2018.

Thus this "solution" after a few years would be the same as dumping the waste into the sea, but in a very expensive and creative way.

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

#208

Post by nickik »

jws wrote: post #24
nickik wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mostly wrong. > No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Nuclear waste is incredibly well controlled, unlike waste from solar, wind or fossil. Most Western countries didn't have contamination from civil nuclear waste at all and specially not in the last 30 years. Civilian Nuclear waste has basically killed nobody. Calling it the 'm…

One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced… 1.1 billion hectares of land are farmed to feed the 7.5 billion people. That works out to 2000 square meters per person. World energy consumption (all sources) runs about 18 terawatts, or 2400 watts per person. That is 58kWhr per…

I never claimed its impossible with solar, its just not very smart. Your calculation also leaves out a lot of issues with solar and intermittency. But even those things could be overcome.

However, how is that better? Uranium mining is tiny and a non issue. Thorium is even more plentiful, literally a waste product. We have enough of that stuff for 1000s of years. We have the technology to use it on mass scale and it has PROVEN track record of replacing fossil fuels at mass scales.

Solar panel waste is further duplicated by the live cycle and the lack of life cycle planning in the global supply.

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

#209

Post by nickik »

saagarjha wrote: post #41
nickik wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The byproducts (generally leaking radioactive waste) The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true. While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything. Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable. > Third, th…

> The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true. While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything. Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable. While I view nuclear power relatively favorably, this is an extr…

Nuclear waste form civilian power production has not done much. Basically not a single person died from it. I tired to separate civilian waste from nuclear weapons waste, that has a worse track record.

The few accidents that have happened are far smaller in scale then the 'horror' stories that people believe in and pretty much all of those are overhanging issue from the early nuclear age.

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

#210

Post by nickik »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #94
saagarjha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true. While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything. Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable. While I view nuclear power relatively favorably, this is an extr…

Hanford waste is radionuclides dissolved in acid to get pure plutonium out. It leaks. It's from the Cold War nuclear weapons program. [1] Commercial nuclear waste is solid ceramic Uranium/fission product-oxide. It does not leak. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/hanford.html

That's a weapons production cite. In most post I tried to separate civilian power waste from that.

If we look at civilian power production in the last 40 years its basically a non issue.

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