Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Activists who embrace nuclear power

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 598 posts

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#431

Post by thinkcontext »

ssijak wrote: post #46

Now that launching stuff into orbit is getting much cheaper, is there any reasonable calculation to just ship nuclear waste into orbit? Or even further away (crashing it into Sun would be ideal but too expensive I guess)

The US produces 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste per year. There's also about 90,000 metric tons in storage.

Falcon Heavy is the most cost effective rocket in operation. For $90M it can send 8 tons to GTO (its harder to get things into the sun but the numbers are available for GTO).

So just the launching would cost would be $22.5B per year. And it would be $1T to take care of the existing waste. But that's way too low because transporting the waste and preparing it for launch would be very expensive in itself.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#432

Post by epistasis »

mlyle wrote: post #384
runarberg wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Solar panels are not recyclable. Neither are wind mills I don’t understand why you say that. If a wind mill blade is made out of aluminium, it can be recycled as aluminium after it has been decommissioned. It being used in a high tech device doesn’t change that fact. Same if solar cells are primarily made out of glass and silicon, both could be recycled into anything else that requires glass or silicon. I also don’…

> Edit: ... Most parts of a nuclear power plant aren’t easy to recycle either, A nuclear power plant is compact compared to the energy produced, and has an exceptionally long lifetime in comparison to current "renewables". The components of a solar panel are individually recyclable, but that doesn't mean that anyone has really figured out how to recycle the actual finished panels in any kind of significant energy/res…

Nuclear power plants are absolutely massive, and don't have big wins when it comes to the amount of material needed versus, say, solar. Here's a presentation touting the AP1000, which needs ~5x less concrete than Sizewell B's design (slide 11):

https://web.archive.org/web/20110722031413/http://www.nuclea...

At 2500kg/m^3 of concrete, and excluding the rebar, that's roughly 4.5W/kg of material. For Sizewell B, than's 0.9W/kg.

Meanwhile, a 300W solar panel weighs ~40 pounds, and even if it has massive mounting structures that weigh twice as much as the panel itself, that's 5-10W/kg.

A nuclear powerplant has a lifetime of 40-60 years. Solar panels have warranties of 25 years, but often operate a decade or more longer. Nuclear does not have an "exceptionally long lifetime" in comparison.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#433

Post by mlyle »

epistasis wrote: post #432
mlyle wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: ... Most parts of a nuclear power plant aren’t easy to recycle either, A nuclear power plant is compact compared to the energy produced, and has an exceptionally long lifetime in comparison to current "renewables". The components of a solar panel are individually recyclable, but that doesn't mean that anyone has really figured out how to recycle the actual finished panels in any kind of significant energy/res…

Nuclear power plants are absolutely massive , and don't have big wins when it comes to the amount of material needed versus, say, solar. Here's a presentation touting the AP1000, which needs ~5x less concrete than Sizewell B's design (slide 11): https://web.archive.org/web/20110722031413/http://www.nuclea... At 2500kg/m^3 of concrete, and excluding the rebar, that's roughly 4.5W/kg of material. For Sizewell B, than's…

> Meanwhile, a 300W solar panel weighs ~40 pounds, and even if it has massive mounting structures that weigh twice as much as the panel itself, that's 5-10W/kg.

Someone's forgetting capacity factor-- 10 to 30%.

I also don't think looking at mass-- and primarily concrete-- is the best way to measure resource usage.

> A nuclear powerplant has a lifetime of 40-60 years. Solar panels have warranties of 25 years, but often operate a decade or more longer. Nuclear does not have an "exceptionally long lifetime" in comparison.

A nuclear powerplant might have a design lifetime of 40 years, but we're finding that there is little issue with operating them to 80 years and beyond with maintenance and retrofit programs.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#434

Post by arrosenberg »

epistasis wrote: post #428
arrosenberg wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport. > How much land solar and wind farms use seems kind of minuscule next to all these efforts. And given how urgent the climate disaster is, complaining about land use from solar farms s…

> Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind I think that you'll find the comparison in fuel densities between nuclear and solar/wind does not show nuclear in a good light. Since nuclear fuel doesn't get converted into energy on its own, you had better also include the reactor, turbines, and cooling system if you are going to talk about comparisons of density. And once those get…

I have looked into it and I don't find that at all. I agree that solar and wind are more profitable in the short term, and they fit the private-equity model of funding much better than Nuclear. That has nothing to do with engineering and technology, nor about what the actual best long-term solution for securing our energy needs is.

Even if Wind/Solar-only was viable (it's not), available everywhere (it's not), and substantially cheaper over the lifetime of the plants (it's competitive) it would not make sense to rely only on wind and solar. Besides the intermittency, it still takes 3.125MM solar panels for a 1GW plant according to the USDOE. By my math, that requires 1,400 acres of land just for the space the panels cover. Even if you improve on that, you are still talking about ~1,000 acres. And we'd need to build over-capacity to charge the batteries (more mining-intensive materials) for when power generation is low, it would require 2-4x the land.

That's a LOT of land! It would still make sense to me to replace NatGas with cheap, carbon-free nuclear power and it's small physical footprint.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#435

Post by __turbobrew__ »

arrosenberg wrote: post #309
runarberg wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport. > How much land solar and wind farms use seems kind of minuscule next to all these efforts. And given how urgent the climate disaster is, complaining about land use from solar farms s…

> Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport.

You miss the part where nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. You don't just dig ore out of the ground and put it into a reactor. You need to enrich the fuel which means that much more ore needs to come out of the ground and be processed than the fuel end product.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#436

Post by sullyj3 »

kragen wrote: post #363
brmgb wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have done the math. Land availability is not a bottleneck on this. I'm sorry but people have done the maths and consider land availability to be a major bottleneck for solar and wind (with the fact that it is intermittent). That's like one of the first point put forward in the Bill Gates'book everyone seems to be talking about nowadays. Offshore capacity means it's harder to estimate the ceiling for wind pro…

I don't understand why people are screaming at each other to do the math, or referring to others who have hypothetically done the math, or accusing each other of lying, or claiming that solar panels are made out of rare earth elements (!!), instead of just doing the math themselves here in the comments. It's almost as if they're more interested in being vicious to one another than in finding out the truth. World mark…

The problem with "shut up and calculate" is that sometimes you forget to take things into account. People objecting on grounds of land use elsewhere in this thread have been worried about the size of the infrastructure and mines supporting the manufacture of the solar panels. I have no idea what the ingredients of a solar panel are, or how to calculate W/m^2 after taking area for manufacture into account, but it's plausibly "not quite so many". Then you need to start thinking about batteries for energy storage at night, and so on, and the area increases.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#437

Post by epistasis »

mlyle wrote: post #433
epistasis wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power plants are absolutely massive , and don't have big wins when it comes to the amount of material needed versus, say, solar. Here's a presentation touting the AP1000, which needs ~5x less concrete than Sizewell B's design (slide 11): https://web.archive.org/web/20110722031413/http://www.nuclea... At 2500kg/m^3 of concrete, and excluding the rebar, that's roughly 4.5W/kg of material. For Sizewell B, than's…

> Meanwhile, a 300W solar panel weighs ~40 pounds, and even if it has massive mounting structures that weigh twice as much as the panel itself, that's 5-10W/kg. Someone's forgetting capacity factor-- 10 to 30%. I also don't think looking at mass-- and primarily concrete-- is the best way to measure resource usage. > A nuclear powerplant has a lifetime of 40-60 years. Solar panels have warranties of 25 years, but ofte…

> Someone's forgetting capacity factor-- 10 to 30%.

Which puts solar and nuclear on completely the same scale...

If you don't think mass is a good way to compare, and you're concerned about resources, please suggest the metric that will somehow make nuclear look good. Because that concrete is not very recyclable. So the 95% recyclability of solar panels is making them look a looooot better than nuclear once we move beyond mass to something more nuanced.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#438

Post by inter_netuser »

macspoofing wrote: post #325
elihu wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem. >then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time How abou…

Excellent comment that will likely get downvoted into the oblivion here.

Somehow nuclear waste is a huge problem, but waste from silicon production and decomissioning of solar panels isn't waste.

Roof-solar is probably okay, but replacing baseload with batteries is so far-fetched, I'll believe it when i see it.

Windmills impact microclimate as well, kill off birds by millions - everyone ignores that.

Why is it ok for windmills to destroy climate and life? Since when that became the preferred way to destroy ecosystems?

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#439

Post by nl »

screye wrote: post #282
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…

Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. Disposal of nuclear waste is a huge expense, but the main waste product generated by natural gas (CO2) gets away scot free despite literally being the cause of what might be our generation's biggest problem. The end-of-life expenses of nuclear plants are included in the cost sheets…

> Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk.

This is a (very) common misconception.

A MIT study found that safety and regulatory increases contributes less than 1/3 of the cost increase in nuclear plants since 1975 (after adjusting for inflation):

Since many of the researchers are in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT, they are able to go through and connect the cost changes to specific motivations and check these connections by looking at patents and journal papers that describe the ideas driving these changes.

Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators "required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material." Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects.

But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#440

Post by nl »

macspoofing wrote: post #325
elihu wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem. >then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time How abou…

There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem.

Hi from Australia.

We have huge unpopulated deserts and humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems outside climate change.

We are about to take a tiny, tiny part, put some solar panels on it and send the electricity to power Singapore.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/21/australi...

> Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever.

Solar panels are already over 90% recyclable, with some processes recycling up to 99%: https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewab...

Post reply on HN