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Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#341

Post by rpiguyshy »

tedk-42 wrote: post #331
rpiguyshy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok but i just have doubts. you say that buried nuclear waste is safe but i need more detail. what if it leaks into ground water? can it leak? what kind of containment is necessary? and does it need to be guarded? do people want the stuff for bombs or something? i just have a bunch of doubts and i think they are reasonable. and meanwhile solar is simple and there are no doubts about it. probably much easier to do clea…

The problem is that you see it as one or the other as opposed to investing in BOTH solutions and trying to adopt both technologies for the better. It seems like we should put all our eggs into one basket but why? If people realised how 'anti-nuclear' they actually were, things would move along faster.

well for the record i am not saying we should have zero nuclear. i think we need nuclear waste products to power rovers, do certain medical diagnostics and we need nuclear subs to keep the chinese at bay.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#342

Post by cycomanic »

macspoofing wrote: post #257
epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Solar and win…

>>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear.

>Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem.

What do you call prohibitively expensive? It's expensive enough that it's essentially uneconomical to build any new plants by a large margin and that margin is increasing compared to wind and solar.

>Solar and wind cannot power an economy. That's not true, they can using a sufficiently large grid and overprovisioning.

>But let's pretend they can so as to not get bogged down on this point. Let's also pretend they are non-trivially cheaper than nuclear. Even under those assumptions nuclear still wins in my eyes.

>Global warming is only one environmental problem we have to solve and it may not be the most important one either. The other one is regular environmental collapse due to needing to support 7-10 billion people. In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements (land-use around mining for necessary materials, deployment and maintenance of the collectors, and finally land-fill once out of use). And they will always have those horrendous land-use requirements because solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. Worse, we're going to need to increase solar and wind collector production by several orders of magnitude (and come up with a battery technology that doesn't exist today) to fully support a fossil fuel transition. What cost do you think the environment will bear for that compared to nuclear infrastructure?

So you're including mining for solar/wind but not nuclear? Also you're talking about that we need to increase solar and wind production by several orders of magnitude, well we would need to do that with nuclear as well. And you conveniently ignore the fact that uranium is a limited resource. Also regarding your space requirements, it's true that nuclear power plants have a relatively small footprint, however we are limited to where we can build them and the footprint for power distribution is considerable. That is one of the big plus points of decentralized power sources you can produce the power were you need it (which also significantly reduces additional space requirements). Let's not even talk about the energy loss from long distance distribution.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#343

Post by brmgb »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #318
macspoofing wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements. No I didn't. A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled a…

> No I didn't. Yes. You did. Solar panels do not use rare earth minerals. Go google it. Rare earth magnets are used in some wind turbines, but alternatives exist there. That does change the cost calculations a touch, but not enough to invalidate the viability of a renewables + storage solution. > I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. People have done the math. Land availabilit…

> People have done the math. Land availability is not a bottleneck on this.

I'm sorry but people have done the maths and consider land availability to be a major bottleneck for solar and wind (with the fact that it is intermittent). That's like one of the first point put forward in the Bill Gates'book everyone seems to be talking about nowadays. Offshore capacity means it's harder to estimate the ceiling for wind production but it doesn't seem to be the slam dunk you would like it to be especially when you consider that the world consumption will likely keep rising for decades as population grows and more and more get access to electricity.

> If nuclear was the slam dunk you're assuming, China would just do it.

China has scaled down its nuclear investment under the dual pressure of significant public opposition after the Fukushima disaster and a need to tighten its investments (China's debt situation is tricky to manage and the CCP absolutely wants to avoid a situation comparable to what happened to Japan in the 90s).

China isn't the be all end all regarding energy policies.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#344

Post by dismayedjim »

cbmuser wrote: post #299
Daho0n wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do if you have to shut down the nuclear power plant in bad weather for some reason? Build a new one as a backup? There's always a weak link if you want to find one, nuclear, wind or whatever.

> What do you do if you have to shut down the nuclear power plant in bad weather for some reason? You don’t. If your plant is properly designed, you’re absolutely immune to any extreme weather conditions. Heck, we have nuclear-powered vehicles sent beyond our galaxy and they’re still working. Nuclear power is literally the only form of energy we have that can work under virtually all environmental conditions. Nuclear…

It doesn't just have to be designed right, it has to be built right. Like Fukishima where the design engineer resigned during construction over how low the sea wall was built. The sister plant which was closer to the epicenter had the proper sea wall and as such it was totally fine despite the higher waves.

The problem with nuclear is we can't have it until we have eliminated corruption. In that industry it can lead to a literal nuclear meltdown.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#345

Post by throwawaygulf »

gdubs wrote: post #323
throwawaygulf wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And that is general global instability. E.g., things sure feel like they've come off the rails recently and things I used to take for granted: that competent people would generally be in charge, has been challenged. There's almost never been a safer time to be alive, and there have been incompetent leaders since time immemorial. Not even a lifetime ago incompetent leadership caused tens of millions of people to peri…

I read Pinker’s book — I’m familiar with the argument. I also think it looks at a data point (now) and compares it to the long tail of history, and says, “things are great!” I’m not sure if you look at the curve’s derivative since, say, 1995, it’s clear we’re heading in a good direction. And I’m an optimist. There have been warning signs flashing “systems failure” for a little while now, like a “check engine light” p…

>I'm not sure if you look at the curve’s derivative since, say, 1995, it’s clear we’re heading in a good direction.

Crime was near all-time highs in the US, Europe's deadliest war since WWII was raging, numerous civil wars in Africa and elsewhere were claiming millions... It's clear it's way better, and definitely got better since your arbitrary timeline.

>I don’t think there’s been a year in modern history like 2020 since 1968, and even that pales in comparison.

Of course 2020 was a weird year, but to compare that to the height of the Vietnam and Cold War, with nuclear mutually assured destruction just inches away, among the many other things boiling is just naivete. 2020 was NOTHING like 1968, not even a close comparison.

>We’re in the midst of a global pandemic with nearly 500k dead in America alone.

Indeed, but we're rounding it out, things are slowly opening back up, and vaccines are out.

>We’ve suffered two deep, major financial crises in roughly a decade.

And mostly recovered.

>The entire west coast was on fire this fall

Objectively false. Less than 50 people died. If the entire coast was on fire, that number would be several orders of magnitude larger.

>Texas completely fell apart this week.

And recovered this week.

>Living in a bubble?

Correct, you're not living in reality. You're living in a constructed delusion that doesn't match with facts, has no context for history, and is just neurotic/alarmist.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#346

Post by lawrenceyan »

The risks you end up taking on don't make sense for the amount of energy received. Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world. They're cheaper too.

In terms of baseload requirements, batteries are the far safer alternative for transitioning away from fossil fuels. Nuclear power may have been tenable as a solution, even with the heightened risks, if improvements in battery technology were stagnant and/or stagnating. But this hasn't been the case, and so nuclear fission as an energy source will likely become a relic of our past. Now nuclear fusion on the other hand...

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#347

Post by teslaberry »

epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

China-nuclear plants , not wind or solar. only for export . India--nuclear plants, no wind/solar. Texas.

Keep telling yourself that grid batteries solve every problem with renewables, let alone all intermitancy issues with renewables anytime soon. you're living in your own bubble.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#348

Post by kragen »

epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

As I said the other day, nuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources.

Ahead of its time, it was unjustly rejected and persecuted by the ignorant masses. Its advocates are bonded by the quiet pride that at least they weren't unthinkingly siding with those masses. (And they're right!) Meanwhile, as the Amiga stagnated for terribly unfair reasons, other, scrappier technologies like the i386 and UMG-Si grew from being worthless boondoggles (except in special circumstances, like spaceflight) to being actually far better and cheaper. But the Amiga advocates keep the faith, sharing their suffering and resentment. They inevitably try the alternatives a little and perhaps even start to like them. Gradually their denial recedes, decade by decade.

But they know that however much fab costs go down and leave their beloved Amiga behind in the dust, you'll never be able to run nuclear submarines and Antarctic research stations on solar panels.

You say, "Solar and wind are going to undercut that cost very soon." But the truth is that wind, where available, undercut the cost of steam power (including nuclear and coal) a decade ago, and PV undercut it in equatorial parts of the world about four years ago, or even more of the world if you don't include storage.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#349

Post by sudosysgen »

dismayedjim wrote: post #344
cbmuser wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you do if you have to shut down the nuclear power plant in bad weather for some reason? You don’t. If your plant is properly designed, you’re absolutely immune to any extreme weather conditions. Heck, we have nuclear-powered vehicles sent beyond our galaxy and they’re still working. Nuclear power is literally the only form of energy we have that can work under virtually all environmental conditions. Nuclear…

It doesn't just have to be designed right, it has to be built right. Like Fukishima where the design engineer resigned during construction over how low the sea wall was built. The sister plant which was closer to the epicenter had the proper sea wall and as such it was totally fine despite the higher waves. The problem with nuclear is we can't have it until we have eliminated corruption. In that industry it can lead…

You have to make the construction process transparent and verifiable enough and then these issues can be removed. It's not a given, but it certainly is doable.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#350

Post by cycomanic »

cbmuser wrote: post #296
smallnamespace wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your grid covers a large region and you have sufficient transmission, then somewhere , there is excess electricity from wind/solar that you can bring in. Remember, we're talking about a world where building renewables to 4x peak demand would be actually economical. This works on the same principle as an insurance market: it's likely that even at 4x capacity, your local solar farm has a few cloudy days. It's highly…

> It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. When it’s night in Germany, it’s night in the rest of Europe. When there is no wind in Germany, there isn’t usually much more wind across Europe. Please take some look at actual electricity generating data for Germany (see smard.de) and find out why your as…

You should have a look at the relevant literature. There have been several calculations made on how much overprovisioning is needed to run the grid only on wind, hydro and solar. It is significant but doable.

Also have a look here https://www.windy.com/?46.529,20.479,4 and look at the variation across Europe, especially if you include offshore wind.

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