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New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

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Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#41

Post by cletus »

It's weird to me how many advocates there are for nuclear power on HN. Years ago, I would've been one of them. Now? I don't think I can trust people with nuclear power.

People aren't capable of having a sufficiently long term view. People make short term decisions that are bad in the long term all the time. You see accident after accident caused by people making short term decisions that have a low probability of failure but where failure has disproportionately bad consequences. Just look at unsafe and drunk driving.

So the problems with fission power are:

1. We have no good way of disposing with the waste. This includes the waste produced in enriching Uranium (eg what to do with all the UrF6) as well as reactor waste.

2. As much as coal and other fossil fuels have negative health effects and probably cause deaths, there is only so much damage a single coal plant can do. A single nuclear plant on the other hand can make an area of thousands of miles uninhabitable for generations.

3. Storage and transportation of fissile material (ie reactor fuel) presents a bunch of environmental and security issues.

Renewable (specifically solar and wind) really are the solution here.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#42

Post by fdgdsagfsg »

tomp wrote: post #28

> renewables and nukes and? Nuclear power is just as "renewable" as wind, solar & hydro in every sense of the word.

It's not renewable in any sense of the word! Renewable doesn't mean "clean" (and there's an argument to be made that nuclear isn't even clean, but I digress).

Renewable means an energy source that literally renews itself. To avoid breaking the second law of thermos that implies there is an energy source (Sun) that recharges the renewable energy source with energy that would otherwise be wasted, therefore, you cannot net consume the resource.

In the case of wind and sunlight there is no net consumption of the resource because they'd otherwise be wasted (assuming you put solar over a parking lot and not over fertile land).

Nuclear cannot be renewable because fissile elements don't renew themselves (well, not without a supernova). We can extend the usefulness of the fuel with advanced reactors, but eventually all nuclear fuels, be they fast, thermal, fission or fusion end up with the most stable isotope of Fe - the most stable isotope.

In fact, fossil fuels are infinitely more renewable than nuclear fuels since eventually the biosphere dies, decays and some of material gets geologically captured to become fossil fuels (in geological timeframes).

There are (at least) two energy sources that are definitely not renewable: - Nuclear - Tidal (when we extract energy from a tide, the moon looses potential energy)

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#43

Post by willis936 »

tomp wrote: post #28

> renewables and nukes and? Nuclear power is just as "renewable" as wind, solar & hydro in every sense of the word.

JohnCenaAreYouSureAboutThat.avi

Renewable is a soft definition, however all things considered “renewable” are based off of solar, geothermal, or tidal power. Fission fuels are only generated as endothermic nuclear reactions in violent cosmic events, of which there are none on our schedule. How would we go about finding more fission material once we’ve burned it all up into stable isotopes? “Renewable” is best defined as “useable power that is isn’t non-renewable”. “Non-renewable” is easier to define, since it involves a very clear, short term, one way reaction. Also on fossil fuels: they stopped being generated millions of years ago, so, no, they are not renewable currently.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#44

Post by tomp »

fdgdsagfsg wrote: post #42
tomp wrote: post #28

> renewables and nukes and? Nuclear power is just as "renewable" as wind, solar & hydro in every sense of the word.

It's not renewable in any sense of the word! Renewable doesn't mean "clean" (and there's an argument to be made that nuclear isn't even clean, but I digress). Renewable means an energy source that literally renews itself. To avoid breaking the second law of thermos that implies there is an energy source (Sun) that recharges the renewable energy source with energy that would otherwise be wasted, therefore, you cannot…

Sun is powered by nuclear power.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#45

Post by dependsontheq »

payne92 wrote: post #3

Unpopular opinion (though getting less so): the politicization of nuclear energy in the 1960s and the resulting lack of investment & R&D advances may go down as one of the biggest blunders in human history. Even with some modest ongoing investments, we'd have designs that are FAR safer than systems currently in operation.

“Would”

The problem with nuclear fission will always be the moments when somebody “should” have done a safety test or should have thought about it.

I often think about the reaction Angela Merkel had to the Fukushima incident. Before the Tsunami she had just scrapped the plan to end nuclear in Germany. She is a trained research physicists so that is the position you would expect from her. After Fukushima she immediately started to work on the complete shutdown.

Of course there might a lot of political calculation and the general mood shifted, but in Interviews she said that there was one thing that really got her. Fukushima was in Japan, and after Tschernobyl she always thought that this was an expected problem in a country like the Soviet Union, but in general nuclear should be safe. But after Fukushima, after the obviously bad planning and the mistakes that were done again and again, how can we expect that any country can manage the safety processes better, when Japan can’t do it. It’s not so much a technological question it’s a human and process question.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#46

Post by flaviu1 »

andrewla wrote: post #35
eloff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People got scared (somewhat legitimately) and we regulated them to death. It became so risky and so expensive to invest in nuclear that nobody, not even the big companies with nuclear divisions like GE did it. People talk about failures of the market all the time, and there are many. This was one of the failures of regulation. I think we're starting to see a small revival here finally, but is it too late? Renewables…

I don't think this can be considered a failure of regulation; that the regulation stopped short of an outright ban is much more of a failure of regulation in some ways. The tail risks involved in nuclear power are just too high. It's not a question of laymen misunderstanding or thinking that radiation is magic or being scared by the specter of Chernobyl. If there's anything that Fukushima should have taught us, it's…

> If there's anything that Fukushima should have taught us, it's that we underestimate the risk that bad things can happen with nuclear, and we overestimate our ability to engineer around those things.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...:

> there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out.[11] However, studies by the World Health Organisation and Tokyo University have shown that no discernible increase in the rate of cancer deaths is expected[12]

So basically Fukushima has taught us that over-reacting to nuclear accidents has not yet gone out of fashion? And that even when "radiation releases exceed official safety guidelines", there are still almost no consequences to humans?

Comparing fission generation to those other things is unfair. Fission reactors produce gigawatts of power, Shoe-fitting fluoroscopes were gimmicks and the Ford Nucleon was literally a toy.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#47

Post by II2II »

dTal wrote: post #19
eloff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People got scared (somewhat legitimately) and we regulated them to death. It became so risky and so expensive to invest in nuclear that nobody, not even the big companies with nuclear divisions like GE did it. People talk about failures of the market all the time, and there are many. This was one of the failures of regulation. I think we're starting to see a small revival here finally, but is it too late? Renewables…

I think it was mostly a failure of human psychology. The over-regulation was simply a manifestation of that - democracy working perfectly. Blunder 1: war. We dropped a nuclear bomb before we ever made a nuclear power plant. Nuclear became inextricably linked with sickness and death instead of power and prosperity. Blunder 2: broken heuristic risk assessment. Radiation is scary because it's "spooky" - it's undetectabl…

For the general population, nuclear energy may be spooky. On the other hand, some opponents of nuclear energy are well informed. Claiming that their risk assessment is broken does not help the discussion because chances are that they are assessing different risks and they are looking towards different solutions.

From what I have seen, nuclear has earned a negative reputation from far more than its association with weapons and disasters. Many supporters of nuclear also overly enthusiastic in presenting it as the solution rather than as a solution. It makes it sound like the issues with nuclear are being glossed over, or outright ignored. This, in turn, makes supporters of nuclear sound ill informed or as though they have a vested interest.

If nuclear power is going to have much hope for adoption, people need to be informed of how it works, what the risk factors are (preferably with other forms of power generation being used as context), and what is being done to address those risks. Even then, there is going to be some opposition because different people will view different risks differently.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#48

Post by tomjakubowski »

KoftaBob wrote: post #21
fearhugs wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes... is this an American phrasing? I (from UK) would definitely write this as "renewables and nuclear".

I've never heard an American refer to nuclear power as "nukes". This wording is pure clickbait.

Nuclear powered submarines are commonly called "nukes".

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#49

Post by scohesc »

Why don't we build these reactors deep underground? Doesn't the United States use an old abandoned mine to store spent nuclear rods while they decay?

Is it extremely cost prohibitive to dig down into existing abandoned mines (or even quarries)? and retrofit them with nuclear reactors?

Even if something catastrophic happens, if it's geologically separated by thousands of tons of rocks/dirt/sediment and is away from a water table, it wouldn't be a problem, no?

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#50

Post by andrewla »

overlordalex wrote: post #33
andrewla wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even with some modest ongoing investments, we'd have designs that are FAR safer than systems currently in operation. Why would you think that? The problem with nuclear is that we are playing with significant tail risks, which are the hardest to engineer around. Catastrophic failures can have tremendous consequences, and in a sufficiently complex design there will be possibilities of catastrophic failures. While the…

> I had repeatedly been told that a modern (post-Chernobyl) reactor was simply incapable of these failures modes Fukushima was commissioned in 1971. Chernobyl happened in 1986. I would not call the design a "post-Chernobyl" reactor. I can recommend the section on the wiki page for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe... > I had even, ignorantly, parroted back I think this is p…

You are correct. My sense of history is very flawed. Even the construction of Chernobyl post-dates Fukushima, and in fact most still operating reactors.

Still, Fukushima has forced me to adjust my priors in estimating what the level or risk of a nuclear disaster is; before that I was a strong supporter of nuclear because I thought that the risk was essentially zero.

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