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Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#411

Post by Ono-Sendai »

blabitty wrote: post #134
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…

Forgive my nitpick but power generation doesn't generate electrons it pushes existing ones around, very slowly. Highly recommend http://amasci.com/miscon/whatis.html to anyone interested in discovering how inconsistently electrical concepts are defined and taught.

I don't think you are correct. For electricity to propagate at near light speed, electrons will have to move at near light speed, if only for a short time. Or to be a little more precise, shape changes in the electron wavefunction will need to propagate at near light speed. I think we can do this to electrons because their mass is so low.

This only really applies when a circuit is opened or closed however. Once a circuit reaches a stable state (voltage is unchanged) the electrons don't move fast, I guess.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#412

Post by systematical »

codecamper wrote: post #284
systematical wrote: post #4

Go heavy nuclear and invest in fusion. The later will lead to clean abundant energy and eventually a reduction in resource scarcity. What is the economics of air? That's the economics we want.

Luckily we already have a working fusion reactor. It's 92M miles away, but it's a big one. All that is required are some solar panels and wind turbines to harness its power.

I'm down for a Dyson Swarm.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#413

Post by acdha »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #136
fulafel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This study starts with existing laissez-faire energy demand projections. Hopefully another large part of the emissions reduction will come from people adopting less wasteful living, transport, eating etc behaviours and preferences.

> Hopefully another large part of the reduction will come from people adopting less wasteful living, transport, eating etc behaviours and preferences Zero chance. This would require reductions in quality of life. Even minor fuel tax increases have spawned capital-freezing protests from the Arab world to Paris.

Less wasteful is a huge, unsupported claim contradicted by many examples. As a simple one, think about how much electricity the 1990 PC user consumed compared to one today – EnergyStar encouraged that but it had basically nobody cared about it enough to whine about it, much less riot. Lightbulbs did have some efforts to turn them into a conservative rallying point but even Trump supporting it wasn’t enough to get traction because only the most diehard ideologues are going to say they want to give more of their money to the utility company.

The real lesson here is that the best way is to give people clear price signals. Stop subsidizing fossil fuel consumption and suddenly people will make less wasteful choices in many areas. We saw this in the US before fracking took off, when fuel economy was creeping up because $4/gallon gas was enough to get people thinking about whether they really needed a Suburban to take 1-2 people grocery shopping.

The Arab & French protests did involve fuel pricing but that was more in the sense of being the last straw than an unavoidable cause. If the French government hadn’t been using that to lower taxes on the wealthy, for example, or simply been less unpopular before it started, it wouldn’t have flared up like that. It’s a valid concern but I wouldn’t generalize too much from a more complex scenario than it might appear. Especially in the US, where the average family could make substantial energy usage reductions with simple, low-impact changes (combining trips, reducing food waste, insulating houses, replacing antique appliances, etc. are not the stuff of revolution).

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#414

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> It's no longer cost competitive

There is no equivalent in energy density. And this is what matters the most.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#415

Post by ekianjo »

elihu wrote: post #315
macspoofing wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements. No, they don't. There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. We'd consider a utility-scale solar array that's a couple square miles to be absolutely huge, but plo…

> also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy.

Unfortunately, you don't need the energy where people do not live, and transporting energy has a efficiency cost as well. In other words, it's massively more efficient to produce energy where you use it.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#416

Post by ekianjo »

brightball wrote: post #270
macspoofing wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. We have a lot of parking lots out there. IMO the model used for parking at Lego Land looks like the ideal approach for solar expansion to me.

Solar panels degrade over time, so it's massive waste over a long period of time to replace them as well. There's no free lunch anywhere.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#417

Post by ekianjo »

runarberg wrote: post #297
macspoofing wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. Sure the supply chain to support the infrastructure required for 10 billion people is a lot on the environment, and we certainly could do a lot better. But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels), better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn…

> It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium.

Because Uranium is much much much much more dense in terms of energy than anything used to make solar panels. That's why mining uranium does not even register in the equation.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#418

Post by belorn »

BillyTheKing wrote: post #178
vlovich123 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is actually intentionally crippled through legislation under over-hyped concerns over dirty bombs accidents (for the right and left politically inclined respectively). Nuclear can be done safe, efficient, cheap and at-scale. All it requires is to allow for the secondary market of spent fuel like was originally started when nuclear first starting to get rolled out. The security concerns can be handled in other…

I used to be of the same opinion, but I gotta say that Fukushima really did have an impact on me (on the long-run, it didn't have an immediate impact). But I have been wondering, if an incredibly advanced nation such as Japan faces very serious issues with their nuclear power-plants, is it really the right choice? Can we really guarantee that nothing goes seriously wrong, ever? Cause that's the standard those plants…

Given the risk of natural disasters, which place seem safest? Downstream of a dam for a hydro plant, or near a nuclear plant?

188,000 people were evacuated in California following some unexpected rainy weather.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#419

Post by ridgeguy »

selimthegrim wrote: post #400
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Yes. You did. Solar panels do not use rare earth minerals. Go google it. Some new designs do call for hafnium

Hafnium isn't a rare earth element [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#420

Post by Robotbeat »

pfdietz wrote: post #404
Robotbeat wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they can, but it’s a lot harder than people realize. To replace 1GW of nuclear completely in Virginia without a bunch of transmission, you may need about 14GW nameplate solar and about 50GWh of storage. It’s not cheap. Source: here, with 0 as exponent, 2011 as the year, 2020 cost scenario, and only solar and battery storage. https://model.energy

I assume that was with just batteries for storage, not batteries and hydrogen. Adding hydrogen often greatly reduces the overcapacity needed in those model solutions.

As you can see in that model, you're correct. But I generally find the assumptions in those solutions to be optimistic. Large scale hydrogen storage using salt domes is not as mature of a technology as we would like. Solar and battery are solutions mostly independent of geography (although latitude and weather play a role in solar, of course). Purely replacing nuclear without relying on any backup or geographic trickery can be simulated by just using solar and battery.

But it's also useful as a way of understanding these systems. It's often insisted that you CANNOT replace baseload power with solar and battery, and yet you, in fact, can. Adding other energy (including nuclear) and storage sources as well as long-distance transmission help tremendously, in this case by about a factor of 2-3x or so in cost.

If you can't tell, I'm bothered almost exactly equally by those arguing against nuclear as I am by those who argue against solar and wind. Both "sides" are wrong because either options would suffice and are safe. But it's much cheaper to just do both, or expressed in another way, allow us to emit the least amount of carbon emissions possible without freezing anyone to death or causing pipes to burst or dealing out energy poverty.

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