Live data from Hacker News

Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

spectrum.ieee.org

251–260 of 357 posts

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but then that should not be falsely characterized as a failure of the nuclear industry and technology. The failure was humans, and a very specific subset at that.

> The failure was humans Isn't it always true, for such matters? As we cannot avoid committing errors it seems better to prefer a way without any risk of major accident (very dangerous radioactive things, difficult to cleanup, travelling long-distance thanks to wind, rain...). No wonder renewable sources quickly gain traction.

Characterizing the failure of politicians as a failure of nuclear power is the error in logic I am talking about.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slides of the 20 hours lectures at Ecoles des Mines Paris https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fqoACrCFtlXKonP266Dk... The lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgy0rW0oaFI&list=PLMDQXkItOZ... The (already provided in a previous comment) EROEI study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1... The one specific slide about the low EROEI of solar panel is in: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1…

A typical game for making EROEI look bad is to expand system boundaries. That is, you say "we're paying these workers, and they're consuming products and services that use energy, so ascribe that energy use to this effort". Cast the net widely enough and all energy use in society can be included. But if you do that, EROEI converges to 1, since all energy that is produced is also consumed. And this is perfectly ok. El…

No! China cornered the solar panel market through the use of megawatts of coal-produced electricity! Transportation for all the ores etc is not gaming the metrics.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#253
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy. The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere. The "Great East Japan Earthquake" and its tsunami killed 19,759 people. The…

Yeah it’s all fine, it only displaced a few thousand people from their homes and made an area an uninhabitable wasteland. It’s only going to cost ~$500 billion in total for cleanup[0]. Nevermind the capital loss from the destruction of the power plant itself. Nuclear is definitely a great idea. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_c... Sarcasm aside, it's extremely frustrating when deaths a…

Directly attributable deaths, at that. Who knows how many equivalent nondeaths occurred by subtracting half a year from a hundred people?

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really makes me so sad to see that some people can be so confidently so wrong. It really does appear that believing in renewables as a way to perpetuate industrial society at scale has become part of some people's identity, and regardless of any actual study on the subject, this belief appears to be a necessity to be part of non-deplorable human society. Nuclear reactors are a safe way to electrify as much as can…

Well, my feeling it the exact mirror of that. It is you who I view as hopelessly wrong, someone who has cultish devotion to a failing technology. What would a disinterested observer make of this? They'd look for objective evidence to determine which of us is closer to reality. For example, they might look at what the world is doing right now. What is being installed, renewables or nuclear? Presumably those who are sp…

The quantity of mining required for nuclear vs. solar and wind is massively different.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly wish we had more comments like the one you're responding to. I find most comments here to be obnoxiously polite and I wish more ignorant opinions were publicly demolished as they should be, rather than continue to spread misinformation because it's the polite thing to do. Not all opinions are created equal.

Well, I may be ignorant, but the reality of the my relatives energy bill in Germany and the UK tends to agree with my ignorance. Maybe you are just smart enough to regurgitate the propaganda, but not enough to think for yourself. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/01/the-man-in-...

It's more the fact that you're willfully ignorant which makes you annoying. Numerous people have already explained to you why you're wrong and you just keep repeating yourself. You're a hypocrite and you don't even realize it. I'm not going to waste my time trying to reason with an unreasonable person.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that people spend decades studying and mastering a field where they could just instead read a page of Wikipedia? There are hundreds of entire books about marine ecology and sea physics. Thick books with entire chapters about how energy/matter moves up and down in the ocean. There are more than one type of migration and we don't still know a lot of things about the sea. Physics tell us also that warm…

(Sadly, it feels like my use of the colloquial term "barrel" has triggered a "proclaim authority, dismiss straw man" reflex.)

If its makes you feel better, that word never supposed any problem. For me, is just a synonym of container here

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#257
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does “catching up” mean this is actually working somewhere it can be measured - like we have been with renewables - or is this still theoretical?

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Fuel-loading-beg... https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Fuel-for-Chinese... I mean, google is free

Google is free but you linked to a prototype and a “will be” article rather than proven results.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an EV is 90% efficient An EV is 85-90% efficient with power coming out of the batteries. However, the charging efficiency of the batteries is at about 80%. So the overall efficiency is 80% of 90%, or 72%.

For the sake of replacement, we should not include the charging efficiency, because the context is that of "how kuch energy the car can store" rather than "where it comes from"

It is not about how much it can store. You cannot wish away the charging losses. There are no losses to pumping gas into a tank. Nor can you wish away the losses in the charger itself. Converting AC to DC is hardly 100% efficient.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue An evacuation triggered by a nuclear major accident seems specific to nuclear to me, in the sense: if, instead of this nuclear plant, some field occupied by wind turbines or solar panels were build, there would be no need to evacuate. > Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable No human being can control nor counter this sort of…

> We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors. Or add passive safety measures to nuclear power plants. Fukushima failed because it was still generating too much heat, but that excessive heat couldn’t power a turbine to cool itself down.

Until the next failure comes along that we didn't predict.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A typical game for making EROEI look bad is to expand system boundaries. That is, you say "we're paying these workers, and they're consuming products and services that use energy, so ascribe that energy use to this effort". Cast the net widely enough and all energy use in society can be included. But if you do that, EROEI converges to 1, since all energy that is produced is also consumed. And this is perfectly ok. El…

No! China cornered the solar panel market through the use of megawatts of coal-produced electricity! Transportation for all the ores etc is not gaming the metrics.

It's certainly the case that China has been burning a lot of coal. But that doesn't mean China's PV depends on the existence of coal power to produce it. The objection here seems to be that a renewable economy is impossible because it hasn't sprung into existence fully formed.

And isn't coal responsible for all that concrete nuclear plants there are built with? The vision of a nuclear-powered world implicitly assumes concrete will produced in some other way; this is a harder task that replacing coal electricity with renewable electricity.

Post reply on HN