391–400 of 536 posts
Have they actually designed a solution or is this a fundamental safety risk with all nuclear fuels? All I see addressed is proliferation / reprocessing which is a different thing.
Serious question: what happens when you take one of these fuel pellets and blow it up and disperse it in the atmosphere / water supply, either accidentally or on purpose? Have they actually designed a solution or is this a fundamental safety risk with all nuclear fuels? All I see addressed is proliferation / reprocessing which is a different thing.
Hmm, nothing? There are already billions of tons of uranium dissolved in seawater (there are actually efforts to try to "mine" uranium from seawater), why would a few grams more matter?
As for fission products, humanity has made hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests, as well as the Chernobyl disaster that spewed lots of fission products into the atmoshpere. Unfortunate and stupid, yes, but not the end of humanity either. And fortunately, fission products decay away relatively quickly. So yes, a few grams of fission products from a spent fuel pellet will not make any impact if it's dispersed enough.
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No, because people installing solar routinely fall and die. Because of the low power density of renewables like wind and solar you need a lot of installation sites and constant maintenance of same, which means a lot of opportunities for people to have fatal accidents. Nuclear has the lowest death rate per joule of energy provided of any available power source.
That must be one of the most desperate arguments I’ve seen in favor of nuclear power. You might as well argue agains people having roofs because more people have accidents laying roof tiles. You got to have a roof and you might as well put in something like Tesla solar tiles which serve as both solar cells and roof tiles.
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Is there a particular reason why solar and wind aren't competitive in Ukraine, while in general it seems like those technologies are some of the cheapest sources of energy available today?
> those technologies are some of the cheapest sources of energy available today? No they are not. They only work well at small percentage of generation when you have enough hydropower backup (effectively, batteries): generate from solar during day, and generate from hydro at night (or use fossil fuel backup). > solar In California large amount of electricity is consumed by air conditioners (4%). And they work very we…
What do you see as a small percentage? A country like The Netherlands is generating between 10% and 50% renewable energy without significant storage capacity (it's summer so a lot of that energy comes from solar, but in winter the yields from wind will be higher), and we are one of the worst countries in the EU when it comes to renewables. I thought the need for storage is mostly a problem if you want to reach a high percentage of generation using renewables. Anyway, energy storage also seems beneficial if you want to build a nuclear infrastructure, so it seems like a problem that has to be tackled regardless.
> They are cheapest because they are subsidised on one hand, and on the other hand, nuclear is penalized by lawsuits and regulartions and inspections
I don't think subsidies are really a problem. Weren't the nuclear power infrastructures of France and Ukraine mostly build using state subsidies? The amount of subsidies needed to build renewables is also decreasing. Some might argue subsidies aren't necessary anymore, but we still need massive infrastructure investments to create a smart grid, more interconnectors, etc. Also, nuclear energy might be regulated too much, but I'm not sure how much can be saved without hurting safety.
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I have played around with a simulator for this. Wind and solar is so much cheaper than nuclear power that you can simple build a lot of overcapacity to deal with much of the storage issue. Wind almost never go to zero during a year. For the rest of the time you just use gas power plants. According to my calculations I could get lower kWh price than with nuclear and only provide 10-20% of the power from natural gas. W…
> Wind and solar is so much cheaper than nuclear power Could you please cite a source for this extraordinary claim?
Serious question: what happens when you take one of these fuel pellets and blow it up and disperse it in the atmosphere / water supply, either accidentally or on purpose? Have they actually designed a solution or is this a fundamental safety risk with all nuclear fuels? All I see addressed is proliferation / reprocessing which is a different thing.
> Serious question: what happens when you take one of these fuel pellets and blow it up and disperse it in the atmosphere / water supply, either accidentally or on purpose? Hmm, nothing? There are already billions of tons of uranium dissolved in seawater (there are actually efforts to try to "mine" uranium from seawater), why would a few grams more matter? As for fission products, humanity has made hundreds of atmosp…
I would like to understand exactly if/how this reactor design gets around the risks inherent to explosions of radioactive fuel. If it’s not a problem then why does the marketing take pains to say it will never leave its capsule?
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Picking a nit here. You wrote: > Nuclear is outrageously expensive, though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on that. Nuclear plants are expensive the way GE and Bechtel build them not inherently so. At some point I got to look at the Diablo Canyon cost-to-build breakdown and about 2/3ds of the cost were litigation, licensing, and specialized site and construction prep. Finding people who…
Nuclear has had 70+ years and untold zillions in government research money and subsidies poured into it[1] - if the same level of investment over time had gone into renewables, imagine where they'd be now. [1] worldwide - germany, uk, canada, france, russia etc in addition to the us - everyone did build their experimental gas/molten salt/fuel recycling/pebble bed etc reactor research programs and reactors. not to men…
More importantly, the way solar and wind has been funded has secured competition for lower prices and allowed parallel exploration of multiple technologies. On the other hand, nuclear has been funded like old-school space exploration: heavy on management, low on technical vision, and often with a reward system that favors inefficiency.
In the case of space-exploration, companies like spaceX has come along and shown how innovation can completely change the cost: just compare the crew dragon with the SLS-circus. I believe there is ample space for the same to happen in nuclear power.
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> the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost But most of the time, the “cost” of renewable is undefined, because you simply can't use it: you need the grid to compensate for the intermittent generation. No battery won't be enough unless you are in a really specific situation: - hydroelectric source available, in which case, it's a no-brainer, but most of those sites are already exploited (hydroelectr…
you missed judrogen electrolysis which comes out comparable in expense to nuclear when deployed on top of renewables, amd gives the same level of stability?
And we where supposed to talk about renewable “3 to 10 times cheaper than nuclear”, so bringing a storage technology with an higher investment per Watt than nuclear pretty much defeats the argument.
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And unlike a natural gas plant, it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost. I come to post this Same Thing every time this discussion comes up. It's not about safety. Everyone serious understand nuclear, even current technologies, is "safe enough" to be useful to build out. Nuclear is outrageously expensive , though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on…
Two questions: (1) Night time. (2) Quiet time. Of course there are batteries! But factoring them in seems to increase the cost significantly. Power lines and cross-continent smart grids are fine, too — but also not free to build and operate. So a self-contained unit that does not depend on weather, does not need refueling, and includes its own energy accumulator has some appeal.
Why does electricity at night need to cost the same as electricity during the day? Would Western civilization collapse if it cost twice as much? Three times as much?
How much trouble do we need to go to so aluminum smelters can run at 100% capacity at 2 AM?