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EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

reuters.com

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Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#251

Post by loeg »

laurent92 wrote: post #161
cbmuser wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That single hall is for the _whole_ country for _decades_. Nuclear is the _only_ technology where the fuel and the waste for decades can be stored on-site. It's just extremely dense. The Russians have a single hall for all their waste plus the waste of other countries such as Bulgaria or Ukraine: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s The US even had a nuclear power plant with full fuel reprocessing on…

Just for everyone to have a picture, uranium doesn’t take much room because it is quite heavy: 19.1g/cm3, denser than lead (11.3) but slightly less than gold (19.3) and plutonium (19.8).

Energy density is the main reason you don't need much volume of uranium. Fission is just extremely energetic.

That c² factor in E = m c² is huge (9 * 10¹⁶).

It is really hard for humans to intuit about factors of ten to the power of 16 or 17.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#252

Post by ncmncm »

godelski wrote: post #234
IshKebab wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's a lot less waste, but most waste isn't radioactive!!

It also just isn't a lot of waste. It sounds like a lot, but consider that the US produces 100 million tons of coal waste per year (2014). Hell, solar has ~30ktons of waste a year (just PV panels). 11ktons over 60 years just is astronomically tiny. That's 138 tons a year, 150x less than solar and 500000x less than coal. They just don't compare.

The US produces less coal waste every year, heading rapidly toward zero as the cost of coal power increasingly exceeds that of other sources.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#253

Post by croes »

croes wrote: post #107
rando57 wrote: post #69

I hope that in the future we will seriously consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power Compared to current methods of producing nuclear energy, thorium: - produces significantly more energy per ton - produces significantly less waste - the waste is significantly less dangerous (cools down in x00 years, instead of x0000 years)

We can't even handle a pandemic and you think we can handle nuclear energy?

To the down voters, which company or authority do you trust enough to operate this systems for decades?

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#254

Post by godelski »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #206
option wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, nuclear waste is like taking a 10x smaller than the grain of rise shit in your neighbor’s yard.

Sure, but even a grain of sand that I can't build on or walk over is still going to be annoying. It's still just rude no matter how small you think the problem is.

I'm pretty sure you also can't build on or walk over a large pile of garbage. At least with the grain of sand there's not much area displaced.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#255

Post by cletus »

bliteben wrote: post #230
cletus wrote: post #229

Here we go again: 1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1]; 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost and safety issues; 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF…

would you support fusion power, or are you a one fusion reactor per solar system kind of guy?

Some solar systems have 2 or even 3 fusion reactors. :)

The answer to your question depends on the characteristics of the technology. There are many proposed variations (eg the traditional H-H including heavier isotopes, He₃, pB).

For fuels, deuterium is abundant in the environment environment so isn't an issue. Tritium decays quickly. This is a fairly common theme with lighter elements. U₂₃₅ on the other hand is extremely problematic for being both a heavy metal, long-lived and radioactive.

But I'm not yet convinced we'll actually have commercial fusion power. Aneutronic variants aside, neutron embrittlement and the energy loss from neutrons are significant unsolved problems. Even with powerful magnets, containing a fluid at 100M Kelvin is a significant problems, inherently so because of turbulence.

I hope relatively cheap fusion power is in our future but there's no clear path forward yet.

None of these have particularly problematic byproducts.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#256

Post by lispm »

dstick wrote: post #3
seanhandley wrote: post #2

This is a good move. Nuclear power is poorly understood and easily stigmatised but on balance is far less harmful than burning fossil fuels.

After having read Gates’ latest book on climate change, one metaphor that stuck with me was the one on nuclear energy. It’s as if the Wright brothers invented the first airplane, flew off, crashed, lost every passenger, and then we collectively dropped the entire technology and every promise it held. Never to be visited again. Humans are weird. (and I know the accidents were worse, but we iterated on car and plane sa…

Actually many countries have developed nuclear technology in various forms over decades. The current latest generation of nuclear power plants (like the French EPR) is simply not cost effective. The Russian technology is nothing which would ever have a change to be deployed in a western country, due to its lower technical standards... Russia can't actually clean up its own nuclear installations.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#257

Post by loeg »

patall wrote: post #201
godelski wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bigger factor to note is that 95% of radiation is contained within 1% of the waste. I think the problem here is that people don't realize how small this number is. Because 11ktons sounds like a lot. But if you compare it to any other waste in the world it is tiny. Perspective is lost. I also don't understand why not having a geological repository is an issue. Many researchers propose just storing it in place after…

Call me irrational but storing small amounts of highly radio active material in many locations is, from my point of view, basically asking for a dirty bomb to happen at some point. It only needs an event like the end of the soviet union to happen in a single country on earth and any terrorist organization would be able to buy enough of it. I acknowledge that this may happen anyways with the current situation but your…

Coal plants are like aerosolized dirty bombs operating 24/7, so the trade-off is still good even with that (irrational, IMO, but for the sake of argument let's consider it probable) factor.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#258

Post by webreac »

Klinky wrote: post #170
cbmuser wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The French have been doing it for decades already with not a single casualty: > https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploratio... It's not that they are doing the recycling in a cookie factory.

La Hague dumps radioactive waste liquids into the North Sea. Reactors currently cannot run 100% on MOX. Separation of Plutonium in the recycling process has proliferation concerns. Other countries have found building similar recycling plants challenging due to cost, with DoE estimating $50+ billion. La Hague was initially designed to extract Plutonium for weapons use, which likely justified its costs at the time. The…

La Hague used to dump small quantities of radioactive liquid (mainly water used to clean barrels that contained weakly radioactiv waste) in Nort Sea. When I left (in 1999), the project to completely stop this dump was well advanced. The idea was to vaporized the water and collect the remains in a barrel.

You are right that we have a lot of plutonium that we can not use. The intent of superphenix was to use this plutonium. It failed.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#259

Post by redprince »

dmos62 wrote: post #67
chmod775 wrote: post #15

There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a l…

> some of which already had issues with flooding Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water. Either way, that's a minute detail. A straw man, if you will. Even with the occassional accidents, whether it's kaboom or something more benign, nuclear energy is cleaner than fossil. Plus, that used fuel will likely be reused in the future. I think h…

> Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water.

Schacht Asse II was never a sound choice for waste storage because of several incidents of water ingress even during the time it was an active salt mine. Water ingress became worse after the facility was reused to dump low and medium level waste into it. This wasn't some orderly storage either. Drums of waste were unloaded into caverns by dozers and then closed off with salt. It was accepted that drums would crack open right there and then.

Saltwater is highly corrosive and it will eat these drums in short order. Waste immobilized with concrete will also not resist for long. The current plan is to extract the waste out of this mine again before it floods and widespread nuclear contamination will result. This cock-up will cost the German tax payer an estimated 4 to 6 billion EUR.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#260

Post by tim333 »

fmajid wrote: post #240
acidburnNSA wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear engineer here. I've spent lots of time fighting against persistent myths about thorium. All the things you mention are characteristics of breeder reactors , not just thorium breeders. Uranium-based breeder reactors can do these things as well. Thorium has only one actual physical advantage, and that is that it can do breeding with slow neutrons rather than fast ones. This is a technicality and has lots of com…

A big advantage is that thorium is a non-proliferating nuclear technology, which may explain why so little effort has been put into it.

You can still make bombs https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html#myth3
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