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We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

thebellows.org

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Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#271

Post by pdonis »

kristopolous wrote: post #246
pdonis wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The GND proponents could finally understand marketing and branding and successfully reposition their project to our collective appetites as a collection of small bite-sized community projects but nuclear cannot do this. The GND proponents aren't even talking about specifically how individual GND projects would be executed; they aren't talking about whether it would be a collection of small bite-sized projects or a…

I've been a proponent of it for 8 years and no, that's inaccurate. Instead, many advocate for oil, gas, and nuclear to no longer get tax subsidies, government insured loans, preferential treatment with land use, or be able to freely externalize on to the community the damage and debris their products leave behind. These companies also shouldn't have a Right to profit guaranteed by international trade treaties or be a…

> oil, gas, and nuclear to no longer get tax subsidies, government insured loans, preferential treatment with land use, or be able to freely externalize on to the community the damage and debris their products leave behind

I'm find with that, as long as it also includes no more government subsidies, etc. to renewables. Which have been given out for decades to renewables projects that, unlike oil and gas, do not even produce any actual energy, but are just "research" that promises to produce something Real Soon Now and has been for decades.

> let the market decide

I'm fine with that too, as long as it really is a free market. I do not think an actual free market is what the GND is proposing.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#272

Post by Manfredo_1 »

audunw wrote: post #236
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, I have cherry picked 100% of the current era new nuclear construction projects in France and the US. How selective of me! /s Yup, precisely. You've conveniently ignored successful projects elsewhere, like the Hanul nuclear power plant and the Taishan nuclear plant. Also, you're incorrect that Votgle is the only nuclear project in the US, Turkey Point is installing two more AP1000 reactors. > It includes such t…

> Nuclear costs are historical costs. We know what nuclear costs, because we've built it before. And we've built it at scale. Do we really know the real costs? How many countries outside of Canada has designed and built reactor cores without a nuclear weapons programme? How do you untangle the huge amount of money poured into nuclear weapons programmes from nuclear energy? Do you account for education/training of nuc…

Germany, Japan, Sweden, Korea, Ukraine, Belgium, Spain, Finland, and Argentina form a non-exhaustive list of countries that have built reactors without weapons. The reactor designs are often licensed, but reactors are constructed on site.

I'm not sure why you seem to think that nuclear weapons are connected with nuclear power. These are very different technologies. You don't need control rods, pressure vessels, and heat exchangers to build nuclear weapons. You don't need precise blasting plugs and explosive lenses to build nuclear power plants. The only shared technology is nuclear enrichment, but enrichment infrastructure already exists and countries can buy enriched fuel from other countries.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#273

Post by wwweston »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #268
wwweston wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the article linked in the top-level comment mentioned seawater extraction: "as uranium is extracted, the uranium concentration of seawater decreases, so that greater and greater quantities of water are needed to be processed in order to extract the same amount of uranium. Abbott calculates that the volume of seawater that would need to be processed would become economically impractical in much less than…

Read further in the article: > However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to…

That's in the Forbes article rather than the Phys.org article.

And there's a billion dollar/watt question in there. "Equilibrium" is doing a lot of work in that paragraph. In order for the claim to matter practically, the reactions he's talking about have to replenish uranium to extraction-viable concentration at the same rate it's extracted. It sounds like our Forbes writer is suggesting the process accelerates at least linearly with the extraction rate, and that'd be cool, but forgive me if I don't take it for granted without further focus on why that's a reasonable expectation.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#274

Post by pdonis »

kristopolous wrote: post #256
pdonis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ignoring possible futures and going with historical pasts, nuclear plants are what are called "megaprojects" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject ) and that's their main Achilles heel for our times. Americans at least, have stopped believing in them. This is a valid point as far as the type of nuclear projects that have been done in the past is concerned. However, nuclear has progressed, and many of the desi…

Sure. I've been hearing that for 20 years and I sincerely, eagerly and in good faith welcome their arrival. However, until then, we have to go off of the existing historical reality. We can't run the numbers with any kind of integrity based on what is currently vaporware.

> what is currently vaporware

Designs that are actually operating and producing power are not vaporware. The reasons those designs aren't already doing that in the US are political, not technical.

Anti-nuclear politics in the US has made people believe that every nuclear reactor is a Chernobyl waiting to happen. That was a pernicious lie even in the 1980s, and it is much, much more of a pernicious lie now. In terms of the fairest measurement, which is harm done per unit of energy generated, nuclear power, even with reactors of traditional designs, is orders of magnitude better than any other energy source, including renewables, which in turn are significantly better than oil and coal (coal is by far the worst). And with newer designs, not vaporware but actually operating today, that risk per unit of energy generated is even lower.

A sane US government policy would have had nuclear displacing oil and coal starting in the 1970s, as France and Japan did, and reprocessing the waste instead of beating ourselves over the head with a baseball bat by saying the only option was to store it for 100,000 years, which of course is not practically possible. Then we could have a meaningful conversation about how much of that nuclear base load capacity it makes sense to transition to renewables. Plus, if you really think CO2 emissions are a planetary emergency (I personally don't, but GND advocates do), there would be decades worth of CO2 emissions that the US would not have made at all. Not to mention decades worth of coal still in the ground where it belongs, and oil that could have been used for things much more productive than burning it for energy.

You say we have to go off of the "existing historical reality", and while it's true that we didn't do all those sane things in the past when we should have, that still is no argument for not doing them now. We have an obvious alternative source of base load power that would free us from oil and coal staring us in the face, and instead we're noodling about renewables that can't possibly meet the same demand requirements. That doesn't make sense to me.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#275

Post by pfdietz »

wwweston wrote: post #235
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uranium seawater extraction vastly increases the accessible amount of uranium: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... It's about an order of magnitude more expensive than mining uranium. But the cost of fuel extraction is negligible in the context of the rest of nuclear's cost.

The author of the article linked in the top-level comment mentioned seawater extraction: "as uranium is extracted, the uranium concentration of seawater decreases, so that greater and greater quantities of water are needed to be processed in order to extract the same amount of uranium. Abbott calculates that the volume of seawater that would need to be processed would become economically impractical in much less than…

That doesn't sound right. The oceans contain several billion tons of uranium. A 1 GW(e) reactor uses the equivalent of about 100 tons of natural uranium per year. So, he's claiming the world would have ~1 million reactors.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#276

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pwinnski wrote: post #257
sanderjd wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big problem I have with things like "the green new deal" is that they are buzzwords onto which many different policies can be mapped. I think to lots of people it implies no nuclear, and to some others it doesn't. Both are "right" because the buzzword has no implicit meaning.

I'm not sure how that can be true, given that it's a written proposal[0]. Not many have read it, and certainly both opponents and proponents have made up things that are or are not in it, but it's not just a buzzword. https://docsend.com/view/8gxh826

A lot of the text describes the goals of, and route to, a plan. It is not, itself, actual policy.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#277

Post by dang »

jackcviers3 wrote: post #148

In light if how the U.S. is handling the pandemic, your concern is extremely valid.

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24747057.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#279

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pfdietz wrote: post #250
labawi wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model doesn't support methane generation. Hydrogen is cool, but we should also be investing in efficient methane production. AFAICT it's not too hard to make and has immense advantages - existing transport, storage and use infrastructure and market as a heavily traded good. We can use it for most of our energy or carbon needs with today's technology and existing machines with no or easy modifications. Hydrogen ca…

Sorry, the two options were nuclear vs. renewables + storage (batteries and hydrogen). I don't think very large methane storage makes much sense; where does the carbon come from?

> where does the carbon come from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#280

Post by deeg »

I am very very pro-nuclear and I don't have any major disagreements with this article. However, any such article needs to also address accidents. I believe the most fervent anti-nukers fear accidents and while you'll never be able to fully placate them you can't allow them to accuse the pro-nuke movement of ignoring it.
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