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I changed my mind about nuclear waste

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Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#371

Post by Schroedingersat »

AlanSE wrote: post #359
legitster wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I largely think that NIMBY is still at play. If you are a senator you have nothing to gain with a nuclear reactor in your district. Compare this to Japan that doesn't have ridiculously cheap natural gas, and yet is still doubling down on nuclear despite Fukushima and constant protest. I think renewables are amazing and have a long way still to go, but I look at the current energy mix and it's hard to see a 100%…

If you take the climate science seriously, then you really must accept net-zero by 2050. After that, maybe net-negative. Assuming you're an educated person, the question we must ask is if natural gas is viable to fill in the gaps from renewables in 2050. Given the net-zero requirement, that means a natural gas plant that puts its CO2 emissions back in the ground. That can make sense with direct carbon-capture and sto…

Solar electricity is a cheaper and less mining intensive source of heat than nuclear thermal energy.

Burning green hydrogen is also largely not going to be needed outside of emergency conditions. Capturing the many thousands of twh per year of waste stream methane is essential anyway and can easily cover what hydro and a few hours of battery cannot.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#372

Post by Schroedingersat »

legitster wrote: post #119
refuse wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people say that new reactor designs will be a game changer but I can't help but wonder how much more benefit they'll provide over plain old solar and wind with hydrogen for storage and transport. After the Ukraine invasion, I think it's also worth considering future political instability in reactor permitting and design. I believe the molten salt reactors negate a lot of the problems we've had to consider wi…

If anything, the Ukraine invasion changed my opinion the other way. Germany had the largest investment in solar and wind anywhere in the world. But their dirty secret was that they were dependent on malicious petrostates to keep the lights on this whole time. Meanwhile, the Nordics and France that when all-in on nuclear are enjoying relative energy independence.

So how are those sanctions on rosatom going then? Sooo independent.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#373

Post by Schroedingersat »

rayiner wrote: post #87
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #18

The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the industry, founded an activist group that claims: > Aim for 50% nuclear at least, as per the science. Which suggests a pretty cavalier attitude to "the science". edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting. I thought the timing was mysteriously exact for both her and Shellenberger…

> Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby. At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo that was likely to stand until today…

Smith-putnam was early 40s and both PV and the concept of an economic learning curve have been known since the 50s.

We could have had the wind and solar revolution any time in the last 70 years. Instead trillions were gifted to fossil fuel and nuclear con artists.

This blame of the failure of nuclear on them being forced to sort-of clean up some of their mess rather than just sending native people to mine with no PPE and dumping tailings and waste wherever is a sad attempt at gaslighting.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#374

Post by Schroedingersat »

aeonik wrote: post #16

I've been a bit of a nuclear nerd for a long time, and somehow the author still shares information that is new to me: I had no idea how quickly high-level waste dissipated, love the plots of the radioactive decay. > The decay of heat and radioactivity over time means that after only forty years, the radioactivity of used fuel has decreased to about one-thousandth of the level at the point when it was unloaded. Less t…

So it goes from killing you if you're in the same room in seconds to merely bioaccumulating and poisoning the top levels of the food chain for thousands of square km in a few centuries.

Very nice good faith representation.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#376

Post by dirkt »

Accujack wrote: post #236
whatshisface wrote: post #6

> I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy with waste from nuclear weapons. That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the…

>That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the areas around them are contaminated. No, it's a plain statement, not a "tactic". Power plant wast…

> disposing of power plant waste has never been a real problem.

Germany has been trying to find a location to safely dispose power plant waste for about 40 years or so. All the solutions so far didn't work out [1], they are still searching.

If you have a recommendation that actually works, I am sure they'd be happy to hear it...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik)#Endlage...

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#377

Post by vidarh »

cycomanic wrote: post #363

> All the high-level nuclear waste produced in the world would fit in a single football field to a height of approximately ten yards. > The amount of high-level waste produced during nuclear energy production is also small: a typical large reactor produces about 25-30 tonnes of used fuel per year. That's such a propaganda way of phrasing it, because it considers the waste is essentially pure uranium you would never b…

> Incidentally this is about the same amount of coal we burn per year.

Who are "we"?

The US alone consumed about 545 million short ton of coal in 2021 [1]. From what I can tell, that's in the range of 400 million m^3. Did I get the numbers wrong? (I just semi-randomly picked a converter online as I have no reference point to how heavy a cubic meter of coal is). Because that does not seem at all like about the same amount.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#378

Post by vidarh »

Accujack wrote: post #285
photochemsyn wrote: post #96

Just on technical grounds, this is just not a very educational article. Any discussion of waste from the nuclear fission process should begin with an image of the periodic table and a chart of the curve of binding energy (whose peak, or trough, sits on Iron, which the most stable nuclei relative to fusion or fission processes). From there we can take a look at thermal fission product yield: https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

> if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination, then we'd think twice If every reactor accident created an exclusion zone like this that had to be kept off limits for that long, we likely wouldn't use reactors at all. Most of the nuclear accidents that have happened don't create problems that big, only Chernobyl and Fu…

The exclusion zone from Chernobyl was, and is, also wildly excessive, because at the time we just didn't know.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#379

Post by vidarh »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #354
concordDance wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In deaths per KWh nuclear is king, with a thousandth of the deaths of gas and ten thousandth of coal. Until recently even solar was worse due to installers sometimes falling off roofs! E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... I really do not understand why almost no one bothers to spend a couple of minutes looking up the actual numbers and analysis that people have been doing for decades..…

However rooftop solar reduces the need for a grid and grid maintenance. Are the deaths due to grid building and maintenance accounted for in these figures? It looks to be based on just production, not production plus distribution.

And solar increases the need for storage. There are certainly all kinds of indirect effects that might skew those numbers, and so it's very much possible solar does better. That isn't really the point - the point is that nuclear is a whole lot safer than many widespread alternatives.

While some would like nuclear to replace solar as well, I think most of those of us who see nuclear as unnecessarily maligned are more frustrated by how e.g. coal and fossil fuels remain in the mix despite the massive number of deaths they cause. E.g. the German decision to shut down nuclear plants and as a consequence needing to run coal plants longer will likely cause more deaths than all nuclear plants combined through the history of nuclear power.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#380

Post by dTal »

geysersam wrote: post #338
ackfoobar wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is not forbidden. What is this point replying to? Anyway, over-regulation can make nuclear energy commercially unviable. It doesn't take a ban for nuclear to die.

The regulation is there for a purpose. The idea that nuclear was "killed" by regulation is a kind of "stab-in-the-back" conspiracy theory. If nuclear was truly this obvious answer to aquire abundant clean energy, wouldn't our business friendly leaders embrace it with open arms? A couple of treehuggers didn't stop them from allowing overfishing the sea, or from extracting fuel from oil sands. Despite those things havi…

The regulation is there for a reason, but it doesn't have to be a sensible or proportionate reason. Nuclear power is held to a ludicrously higher safety standard than fossil. You are right to suspect that business interests had a hand in subverting nuclear power - the issue is that while nuclear was getting off the ground, the fossil fuel industry was already well established and integrated with government. The anti-nuclear movement wasn't the ultimate cause, but it allied public opinion with a business interest it should have been viciously fighting.
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