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Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

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

#261

Post by Krasnol »

Moldoteck wrote: post #213
Krasnol wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so weird because despite being so plentiful, the EU has still to throw money at Russia for all kinds of stuff related to nuclear energy. Imagine that: we have all kinds of sanctions on Russia here in the EU. The tone is aggressive. There is fear of a Russian invasion into EU countries, and we still have to get that stuff from Russia. So it seems not to be such an easy solution. It gets even worse for poor cou…

not all eu, just some countries. And those(some that want it) are gradually replacing ru enriched fuel with the one from westinghouse. France and US are boosting local enrichment facilities to replace the russian ones. You'll basically have the same problems with renewables if china would ban export to eu/us

Those are all things that take a looong time and cost a hell lot of money, which could be turned into electricity in 2 years if you'd spend that taxpayer money into renewable technology. The war will be probably over before those countries dependent on Russia will become self-sufficient.

This is desperate, keeping alive an outdated technology. France slept on the change and now has to do everything to keep the show running.

> You'll basically have the same problems with renewables if china would ban export to eu/us

The solution would only include scaling up existing technology which is already there. Technology which doesn't require safety measures compared to nuclear. Technology which isn't that expensive. It would actually be fabulous if they'd do that because maybe countries like Germany could regrow their potential in this sector. They used to be on the front of it before the Merkel goverment killed a whole sector.

So yeah...it's not even close.

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

#262

Post by pfdietz »

polotics wrote: post #254
pfdietz wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both are small compared to the mining needed for society as a whole. So why the hand wringing? You are desperately straining to make a mountain out of a foothill.

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

#263

Post by renaudg »

natmaka wrote: post #200
defrost wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that a small number of mostly older people suffered unduly from the stress of an imposed evacuation. It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue. Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable, due to extreme bushfires destroying every building, would the stress on the elderly be any less?

> 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.

That's what Germany did, but such intermittent renewables can't power an industry-heavy country by themselves for obvious reasons (e.g. the sun tends to set at night)

No matter how much renewables capacity you want to install, you always need a controllable and reliable source for the baseload : that will be either coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Only two of those are low carbon btw.

So let's see :

- Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro (unlike say, Norway).

- They don't want nuclear because politics.

- They became partly reliant on Russian gas, an extraordinary geopolitical own goal (and hilariously, sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated energy company as "green gas")

- The only other solution left is coal, lots of coal. That's what Germany has been doing despite political promises to phase it out.

The two main end results of this policy are :

- Germany has some of the worst CO2 emissions per kWh produced of large European countries. As I write this, it's emitting 23 times more than France (the poster child for nuclear) per kWh. Source : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

- An estimated 22.900 premature deaths every year across the EU from coal-fired power plants. Germany's plants cause an estimated 2490 premature deaths per year in neighbouring countries alone. Source : https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin...

Imagine if France had a nuclear incident causing 2490 deaths in neighbouring countries, every year ?

Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer than all other modes of transportation.

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

#264

Post by rbanffy »

chpatrick wrote: post #259
rbanffy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Fukushima could have been easily predicted. That’s what passive safety is about.

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

#265

Post by pvaldes »

defrost wrote: post #139
natmaka wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deaths (nuclear accident): 1 confirmed from radiation (lung cancer, 4 years later), and 2,202 from evacuation. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... Long-term effects on health are disputed: http://csrp.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-UNSCEAR-Repor... http://www.fukushima-disaster.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/e... https://apjjf.org/thierry-ribault/4761/article The nuclear accident…

> and 2,202 from evacuation. The primary source for that wikipedia quote argues that the act of evacuating "just in case" caused deaths and that had people remained in place no such deaths would have occurred. Over 65,000 people were evacuated from the vicinity. One such death, for example, was 102 year old Fumio Okubo who lived 30 km inland and hanged himself after being forced to move for no good reason. There were…

> The source argues that the act of evacuating "just in case" caused deaths and that had people remained in place no such deaths would have occurred.

We'll never know. Doing history fiction, a more probable outcome would be a lot of people dying by "natural causes" in the next months. We talk about places that were mostly ghost cities for a decade, for some reason.

This common discourse of "but nobody died ever by the direct impact in the left eye, of a radioactive atom called John, on a Thursday", seems a little ridiculous frankly. If we have a pool of people that died, and we dismiss all this people one by one with different tricks and shades of "can't prove, not my fault", yes, of course, "nobody" died.

And Santa Cancer doesn't exist, is the parents.

They know that is false, we also know that is false, and they know that we know it, so what's the point of keeping saying that?

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

#266

Post by littlestymaar »

_ph_ wrote: post #236
littlestymaar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether the number for France is correct, is debatable. While I like the electricitymaps app, they are quite optimistic about nuclear power. They aren't “optimistic”, nuclear simply doesn't emit CO2 directly, and indirect emissions are dwarfed by direct emissions of fossils fuel plants. > What can and is being done is to replace coal as quickly as possible and that is happening. It has been happening for the past 1…

The nuclear emissions seem to be optimistic in their absolute amounts - mining and producing nuclear fuel causes a lot of emissions. No one claimed it exceeds the one of fossil fuel power plants. There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years, both because the CO2 prices have started to move the balance and also because the buildup of renewables has been accelerated again. And no, France hasn't been…

> mining and producing nuclear fuel causes a lot of emissions

It may cause a “lot of emissions” per kilogram of enriched Uranium, but it is very low compared to the amount of energy it produces because you really need little Uranium to produce tons of energy (that's also why all French nuclear fuel waste over 60 years of nuclear industry fit in a single room).

> There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years

This has been the narrative for the past 10 years, yet here we are. And in ten years Germany will still be producing way too much CO2 from its coal plants…

> And no, France hasn't been "filling the gap". Until very recently, Germany had been a constant net electricity exporter.

So is France, but that doesn't mean there's no gap to fill when the wind isn't blowing…

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

#267

Post by locallost »

ludwigschubert wrote: post #133
locallost wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ok but lol you are still obviously denying and acting blind to the fact that for many many years, that neither we will nor our lungs will get back, coal had to be ramped up and overused in Germany This simply isn't true. Coal use for electricity has been declining consistently in Germany and especially since the first shutdowns of nuclear plants (cca 2011). And the replacement was not natural gas as in e.g. the US.

Here’s a chart of Germany’s energy mix over the last 30 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?time... Looks like coal usage for electricity production indeed only went up for ~3 years around 2011, probably we can consider that a mere blip within the downward trend. Wind and solar indeed seem to pick up what nuclear used to bring to the energy mix. Gas usage is only slightly up over 30 years,…

I don't know what would've surely happened. It's easy to think well if they did this not that all the positives would remain they'd just be better. I think life is more complicated than that.

In general what I think is people make a pariah out of Germany and its energy choices, but this is mostly based on false data, which tells me enough. The debate is riddled with false data which lead to even worse conclusions. In the end the numbers are positive and that's all what's important for me. There are better candidates for criticism when looked at individually or even globally, what the individual strategies accomplish on a global scale. So when looked at globally, the German energy transition has accomplished a ton. E.g. the 600TW of solar this year never would've happened without it, which more than offsets the 10-15GW of nuclear they switched off, most of which was past its retirement age.

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

#268

Post by polotics »

pfdietz wrote: post #262
polotics wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Both are small compared to the mining needed for society as a whole. So why the hand wringing? You are desperately straining to make a mountain out of a foothill.

Well no, I am simply certain, from study, that the 100% renewables future being touted is a pipe dream at anything approaching mid 20th century energy consumption levels.

Show me one model that does work with any technology, please, any source anywhere I promise I will review.

Mining to get renewables to anything like the GWHours needed is very significant, look at the graphs in the data I provided

Instead of any kind of data that would show me how I am wrong, all the data I am getting is downvotes and wordage.

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

#269

Post by locallost »

pyrale wrote: post #241
acdha wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstood the point: yes, burning coal is bad. The argument is that once you stop doing that, it’s over. I don’t think that’s completely true - the impact of mining and ash won’t instantly disappear - but if the question is whether we should switch from one thing which has significant environmental hazards to another which poses significant risks or alternatives which do not, that past example suggests that w…

> The argument is that once you stop doing that, it’s over. My issue is that this statement is wrong, though. All the greenhouse gas from coal that was burned in the past, and all the coal we're still burning, will still be around and is still going to slowly bake the planet we live on for the next millenia [1]. Effectively, coal emissions are only considered this way because, after we stop producing, we stop seeing…

This also unfortunately makes a case against nuclear. For instance the worst coal burning country in Europe is Poland, which 5 years ago decided to build nuclear plants. They are set to break ground in a couple years and the first plant will be finished 2033 or so. The last ones 2040. And this all if it goes according to plan, which it won't. And even then they will be left with a significant amount of coal burning plants in the system.

So at least 15 years of effort to get one plant online during which time the country will continue to pump CO2 to the tune of 70% coal in their electricity mix. CO2 that will, as you say, continue to bake the earth. Nuclear is a terrible choice for decarbonization.

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

#270

Post by polotics »

pfdietz wrote: post #260
polotics wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where do you see a vision a nuclear powered world? No-one touts that. Look, if you have numbers, actual data, please provide it. So far all you provided pfdietz is sneer and words.
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