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Ultra Safe Nuclear

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Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#401

Post by StreamBright »

fulafel wrote: post #382
ChuckMcM wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And still, storing energy is not solved and renewables are not reliable. Nuclear vs renewable is apples to oranges. Look at California for an example what happens with your system (or course we ha to look at this like a system and not individual power plants).

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#402

Post by socialdemocrat »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #394
socialdemocrat wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's kinda silly, but that's also the point. People who think nuclear power is dangerous are silly. Solar power is more dangerous simply from the number of people falling off of roofs!

It is dangerous but in an entirely different way. Saying nuclear isn’t dangerous is like saying terrorism isn’t dangerous because more people die fitting roof tiles.

Like a terrorist attack, a nuclear accident, especially a meltdown is a concentrated dramatic event with serious psychological trauma.

One of the really profound effects of Chernobyl was the mental health problems it induced on a large portion on the population.

You got areas in Ukraine such as Rivne where 1/3 of babies born have deformations.

What does that psychological do to people living there you think?

There was hundreds of thousands of cleanup workers and they have 3x the cancer rate of the rest of the population. Yet the UN claims Chernobyl caused no more cancer because they look at the whole Ukrainian population and its cancer numbers which is really hard to do for a country which went through an economic collapse.

In short a lot of official statistics on the impact of nuclear power is highly misleading. Putting such statistics together with statistics of people falling of rooftops is utter nonsense.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#404

Post by littlestymaar »

necheffa wrote: post #269
littlestymaar wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me, could you be more specific about why you think Xenon poisoning is relevant here? I think I just missed your point.

Xenon is both a fission product and a neutron absorber. So if your reactivity dips too low you won't have enough neutrons buzzing around to sustain the reaction and will have to wait for the xenon to decay before you are able to start up again.

I know very well what is Xenon poisoning, I just fail to see the point they were making.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#405

Post by jabl »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #386
projektfu wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining and enriching nuclear fuel is, what, benign?

Comparatively, yes. You need so much less of it. There aren't very many uranium mines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ura...

Further, many uranium mines, especially newer ones, use in-situ leaching, meaning the mine is essentially just a few holes drilled into the ground.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#406

Post by jabl »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #201
shireboy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: why is environmental impact of solar+batteries often not mentioned? Lithium, silicon tetrachloride, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid isn't exactly nice to produce or put into rivers. My 2c: have an "all of the above" approach towards research, dispassionately understand pros and cons and big-picture complexity, instead of retreating to tribes that ignore the complexity.

Well, you skip all the same nasty metals needed for the reactor vessels and support equipment too, so it's an even trade?

Most of the mass of a nuclear power plant is steel and concrete, which are relatively benign.

But the big advantage of nuclear in this case is that the overall amount of materials needed is tiny compared to harvesting more diffuse forms of energy like wind and solar.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#407

Post by JanSt »

fulafel wrote: post #382
ChuckMcM wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Germany alone spends ~$1.2 trn (that would be ~4.8trn on a population adjusted basis for the USA) on the Energiewende, and Germany is far away from being 100% renewables.

The EU now plans to invest another trillion € till 2030. A lot of money is poured into renewables.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#408

Post by littlestymaar »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #242
phamilton wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My read is that it's somehow the inverse of a flywheel. A flywheel means consistent output for variable input whereas this is consistent input leading to variable output. Or maybe I'm way off.

That's my understanding as well. Rather than ramping the power output up or down with demand, you keep it at a constant power level and basically use the molten salt loop as a battery -> store energy when you're outputting more than is required, draw energy from it when you need more that you are producing. The multi-gigawatt nuclear installations are typically supplemented by natural gas "peaker" plants to deal with…

> The multi-gigawatt nuclear installations are typically supplemented by natural gas "peaker" plants to deal with higher demand than the reactor output, but lose any extra power produced.

In France, the load variation is directly handled by the nuclear plants themselves[1], even if there are also some natural gas running (and most of the time their output is more regular than the one of the nuclear plants, so their must be drawbacks to big load variations on a gas plant as well).

[1] https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#409

Post by davedx »

macspoofing wrote: post #323
ajross wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost Except renewables can't actually replace fossil fuels. They need baseload provided by fossil fuels to be viable. They are also defuse energy sources, and so require huge surface area and lots of materials for collectors - not great for a growing world, both in population and per capita energy needs. Oh, they are variable across days, sea…

There are quite some MWh batteries coming online in California. Storage is progressing

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#410

Post by 7952 »

loeg wrote: post #153
xibalba wrote: post #3

Assuming nuclear truly can be ultra safe, how do you convince a public that has seen Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to get on board? Particularly when the "competition" (solar, wind, etc) has such a strong tailwind.

Both the major incidents (Chernobyl and Fukushima) were reactors designed in the era of slide-rules. Neither is a 3rd or 4th generation design. Chernobyl was a bad design, and the incident resulted from Soviet mismanagement (keeping known RBMK reactor flaws secret) in tandem with local mismanagement (the test protocol was completely fucked). Fukushima required active cooling and could not cool itself using its own po…

You haven't answered the question though. How do you get the public on board?
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