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Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#241

Post by jwie »

makeitdouble wrote: post #233
jwie wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is not without risk. Those risks are far more attractive compared to the risks of not using it. Nuclear power is far simpler than people would intuitively believe. The nuclear reactor boils water at scale, the steam spins an electric generator via a steam turbine. The steam plant side of things is well understood technology, almost 170 years old at this point, nuclear power itself is about 70 years old.…

> There is simply no evidence that nuclear power is dangerous Wait, what? You even started your own reply with “Nuclear power is not without risk.” > a lot of evidence to suggest it is the safest, most effective power source we have created. A lot of evidence also suggest the opposite. Again, you took the time to explain how technically nuclear was simple, without engaging with the context it is used in. PS: Fataliti…

Its a full footprint measurement. Coal miner deaths for instance count against it. A study attempted to aggregate fatalities from atmospheric effects from emissions.

It does make nuclear look particularly good, but this is also because it is so energy dense that effort is efficiently allocated. It makes everything except oil and coal look good on a chart.

Most of the deaths attributed to nuclear are more steam plant accidents that also happen in coal plants. Operators are far more likely to die from steam, rotating equipment, or hydraulics than radiation doses. But the energy density of nuclear more efficiently allocates fatalities.

Nuclear power is not dangerous in the same sense that parachuting or commercial flight is not dangerous. You are exposing yourself to lethal forces, but with proper procedures, engineering, and training these activities are safe, even at scale.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#242

Post by diffeomorphism »

erentz wrote: post #181
Sporktacular wrote: post #143

"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-...

Oh, wow. That link is some horribly bad and unrealistic math. Hint: Filtering all oceans in the world might require just a little effort. Also no comment on where uranium is mined?

I saw some merit to the pro-nuclear argument before, but with such "arguments" ....

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#243

Post by pyuser583 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #212
pyuser583 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US nuclear naval fleet isn’t a set of islands. The fuel must be mined and delivered. The nuclear reactor have to be maintained and kept in dry dock, sometimes for years on end. Nobody is afraid of aircraft carriers, even though they are powered by nuclear reactors.

There aren’t that many naval submarine bases, and they’re not particularly close to most of the population. Unfortunately, nuclear reactors need transmission lines to population centers, and we can’t just concentrate reactors into less than a dozen massive stations for the entire country.

Aircraft carriers also have nuclear reactors - and they are much less discreet than submarines.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#244

Post by erentz »

Sporktacular wrote: post #222
erentz wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries and storage haven’t proven to be economical at scale. And also aren’t infinitely sustainable either (renewables and their storage don’t grow on trees, they use more resources and valuable minerals than nuclear). So by your measure we shouldn’t do that either.

Oh, so you concede that nuclear power actually isn't sustainable then? Okay. So if you want to pivot to batteries... look at how much secondary batteries have evolved in the last 70 years. Genuinely novel nuclear power plant designs have barely left the drawing board over the same time. It's pretty hard to conclude batteries have proven uneconomical at scale when the term 'battery' is such a fast moving target. No on…

No, I was reflecting your argument back to you but it goes straight over your head apparently.

> Unlike Uranium, which is relatively scarce and the cost of which, in $ and kg of carbon, after mining and enriching to 5% LEU is considerable.

Simply not true. Nuclear power when considering all lifecycle emissions is lower than wind and solar: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#245

Post by pfdietz »

choko wrote: post #155
fundatus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally natural market forces that are "killing" nuclear energy. It's simply too expensive compared to modern, emission-free alternatives.

Market forces heavily influenced by politics, so not "literally".

Political considerations push nuclear more than the market by itself would. There has not been a single merchant nuclear power plant (that sells into a competitive power market) built anywhere in the world.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#246

Post by pfdietz »

Koemul wrote: post #234
chickenchicken wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and a multiple of that in renewables

To put it in numbers (actual production per year, not capacity) [1] [2]: China nuclear 2010: 75 TW/h China nuclear 2021: 408 TW/h (+333 TW/h) Worldwide nuclear: 2768 => 2800 (+32 TW/h) China solar 2010: 0.7 TW/h China solar 2021: 327 TW/h (+326 TW/h) Worldwide solar: 34 => 1033 (+999 TW/h) Luckily, nuclear doesn't really care about solar, since they complement each other perfectly (wind is a different story and it is…

The annual increase in renewable generation in China is now many times that of the annual increase in nuclear generation. Starting at 2010 leads to an underestimate of the renewables' current velocity advantage over nuclear there.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#247

Post by pfdietz »

pyuser583 wrote: post #160
hindsightbias wrote: post #67

There should be a meme for not very serious articles about nuclear issues. “We need fewer, clearer, and more sensible regulations.” And not a single example of which regulations to drop. How about redlining the appropriate docs and posting those? If they’re all so bad it should be a trivial excercise.

One regulation mentioned is “ linear no-threshold standard (LNT) for measuring doses of radiation.” That’s not a regulation per se, but likely the source of many unnecessary regulations.

LNT is a godsend for the nuclear industry.

The alternative is not "we don't know, so we'll assume the effect is zero"; it's "we don't know, so we'll assume the effect is the largest not ruled out by evidence." And that would make estimates of the effects of radiation in nuclear accidents far worse.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#248

Post by pfdietz »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #242
erentz wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

Oh, wow. That link is some horribly bad and unrealistic math. Hint: Filtering all oceans in the world might require just a little effort. Also no comment on where uranium is mined? I saw some merit to the pro-nuclear argument before, but with such "arguments" ....

In particular, supplying a 1 GW(e) burner reactor would require a U absorber field over 170 km^2 of continental shelf (in a strong current). This is roughly an order of magnitude lower average power/area than solar.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#249

Post by strawhatguy »

Gwypaas wrote: post #224
strawhatguy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something has to cover renewable’s shortfalls when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. In Texas and Germany now, it has shown that over reliance on them have led to more instability in the grid, leading to higher fossil fuels use. Basically you can’t really have renewables without nuclear to back it. They’re a package deal. I don’t know where this renewable purity comes from, but it’s not helpful.

> B. Dealing With Variability and Stability > Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own st…

Yes, it’s fairly obvious that one would have to oversize capacity, etc. to get to renewable purity.

But note this is all hand-wavy future talk, whereas in the here and now, the over reliance has led to higher fossil fuel use.

It’s like language design, where language features could be thought of free with a ‘sufficiently smart compiler’.

In theory, yes 100% renewable is possible. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice… not so much.

abandoning (or at least ignoring) an energy dense and emission free energy source as nuclear is a setup for failure, as has already been seen twice in the past couple years.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#250

Post by cyphar »

pfdietz wrote: post #238
cyphar wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities. By the same token, no energy production technology is "green". Solar panels use rare eart…

> Solar panels use rare earth metals This is a falsehood, one that Shellenberger was notorious for spreading. No, solar panels do not use rare earth metals. That you repeat this well-debunked lie suggests you're getting your talking points from an echo chamber, not reliable sources.

Sorry, you're quite right that they don't use rare earth metals -- I was thinking of the Cadmium telluride and CIGS combinations used in some thin-film solar panels (which aren't rare earth metals -- it's been a while since I've done chemistry), but looking at it some more it seems like they aren't toxic (even though the constituent elements are). My bad (though I don't know who Shellenberger is.)

However, since the currently proposed solution for renewables is to pair them with large battery banks to solve the reliability issue, the greenness issues with batteries still stand.

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