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Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

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Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#481

Post by m4rtink »

pfdietz wrote: post #408
adrianN wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eletrifying heating helps a lot if you integrate it with a smart grid. People generally don't care whether their home is 21 or 23 degrees warm, but the difference enables a lot of load shifting. I know people who take advantage of this today. This is btw, also true for many industrial processes. You'd integrate your car battery with the grid because you'd get cheaper charging in return, or some other form of monetary…

And even more so if your heating and/or cooling system has integrated thermal storage. Storing a joule as heat (or cold) is much easier/cheaper than storing it in a battery.

Not to mention that modern district heating is super efficient thanks to modern isolation methods on all the pipes & you have a huge flexibility of prpducing the heat - combined gas steam cycle, waste incineration or extra heat from thermal or even nuclear power plants.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#482

Post by jillesvangurp »

aktenlage wrote: post #470
jillesvangurp wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a significant risk of that price difference expanding to two orders of magnitude. There is a lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively). At a 100x cost differential, things are going to be brutal for investors with sunk investments in legacy power generation. We're talking electricity prices dropping to tenths of a dollar cent per kw…

> lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively) Can you back that up? Last time I spoke to a guy working on solar, he said a 1% increase in efficiency is considered a great achievement.

I'm talking mostly about cost. Technical efficiency is a nice to have but we are not short on square meters generally.

In any case, I've read several articles lately that are talking 10-30% efficiencies through in the context of various research projects. Some of those things indeed sound a bit wild/far out but not implausible. Most of this is early research. But generally what we have in the market today is not even close to being the final answer or even close to the theoretical limit of what is possible of stuff people work on in labs right now. I'd call 1% a distinct lack of imagination or ambition.

Cost is a whole different matter. Economies of scale and new processes & materials can accomplish a lot. E.g. organic molecules printed on any surface even at a reduced efficiency could end up being so dirt cheap to produce and deploy that it still ends up cheaper per kwh.

If somebody produces something half as efficient but 20 times as cheap, we'd still get 10x more energy for my money. You get cost improvements in all parts of the production process, installation, and operation. IMHO the combination of new solar cell types, ways to produce them, and ways to do that with cheaper materials can over time certainly get us to an order of magnitude cost improvement; if not far more.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#483

Post by yunohn »

adamjb wrote: post #471
skrause wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better term for that is "developed country".

Not really. That implies that a) there's some kind of objective end state for a country and b) they've reached it.

I definitely don't think "western" was the right term for it.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#484

Post by Balgair »

AngryData wrote: post #235
Balgair wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't that then make it easier to get to the bomb?

The limit to producing nukes now is mostly energy requirements. Nuclear chemistry is not a secret and anybody can go to school for it. The limitation is the massive energy requirements to actually purify the materials to such high grades. The Manhattan project used 10% of the US total electrical generation capacity.

So then yes, it would be easier

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#485

Post by ashtonkem »

namanaggarwal wrote: post #429
swilliamsio wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What about Chernobyl" is usually outright dismissed as being an edge case owing its disaster to the Soviet regime, more concerned over image than safety. The real important question, as you aluded to, is "What about Fukushima" - a disaster occuring in a rich, western nation, Japan; Japan is a nation generally seen as being on the leading edge of technology. If a disaster can occur in Japan, it can feasibly happen an…

Totally unrelated but why the land of rising sun (cannot go east than that) is being called a western nation.

“West” is a vague notion that is neither coherent nor consistent. It’s particularly annoying because it’s named after a geographic concept, even though the selection criteria (as much as it exists) is socio-political.

The big giveaway here is that we now consider the great Greek writers as part of the “Western Canon”, while the Greeks and the Romans of the time considered the Greeks to be eastern. Oh and the byzantines are considered mostly considered to be Greek speaking easterners, even though they considered themselves to be Romans and the name “Byzantine Empire” was created long after it fell.

It’s a very confusing thing.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#486

Post by de_watcher »

swilliamsio wrote: post #438
namanaggarwal wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally unrelated but why the land of rising sun (cannot go east than that) is being called a western nation.

Western as in democratic, high income, economically prosperous, broadly supportive of human rights, etc.

Another chilling moment when I realise that I'm way too old and can perceive slow changes of things (like the meanings of words). Please don't do that.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#487

Post by bpizzi »

Udik wrote: post #468
bpizzi wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister ( https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en ...). Your information is very misleading, very. The quote come from the minister of the ecological transition, not 'energy minister', whose official duty is, quoting wikipedia 'responsible for preparing and implementing…

The UK has just finished building the Hornsea Project 1 offshore wind farm. [1] It had a projected cost of $5.2 billion for a nameplate capacity of 1.2GW and an actual average output of 0.46GW. Scaled to the output of the Flamanville mess (1.6GW), it means that a wind farm with equivalent average output would cost about $18 billion. Though I imagine that the average lifetime of a 174-turbines wind farm over an area o…

That data speaks for itself.

And we're still talking about an average output. When wind will not blow enough for meeting consumption then additional energy will be drawn from other sources, and it will, it already is.

Renewable energy is great but it is a non-viable option as a main energy source.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#488

Post by m4rtink »

numpad0 wrote: post #351
pfdietz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vogtle, Summer, Flamanville 3, and Olkiluoto 3 weren't delayed by NIMBY lawsuits. They were delayed by construction screw ups. Nuclear power plants are complex, and if they are required to be constructed to high standards, delays and overruns are almost inevitable. A PV field, on the other hand, is much simpler, with much more inherent redundancy, and can tolerate construction mistakes without either safety implicati…

Virginia -class nuclear submarine(GE "S9G" PWR using HEU cores, 210 MWth) takes as little as 1-2 year from laydown to launching. 19 such hulls is in service, 11 in construction.

Thats still pretty small and usage specific - modern 1000 MW electricity producing nuclear power plants produce about 3000 MW of heat, so about 15x the naval nuclear reactor in your example.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#489

Post by _ph_ »

Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

Even if we completely put aside the discussion about safety, storage of the nuclear waste etc., the killer argument is the price. There are no current designs available that would allow nuclear compete with renewables. On top of that, nuclear power plants are rather slow to switch output levels, so are not a good companion to the renewable producers. Instead we should use gas for filling the gaps in the renewable production. Gas plants are rather quick to change power output and as long as we drill for oil, gas often gets even burned on site as there is not enough demand. And of course we should grow renewable sources strongly.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#490

Post by de_watcher »

jakehop wrote: post #416
swilliamsio wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What about Chernobyl" is usually outright dismissed as being an edge case owing its disaster to the Soviet regime, more concerned over image than safety. The real important question, as you aluded to, is "What about Fukushima" - a disaster occuring in a rich, western nation, Japan; Japan is a nation generally seen as being on the leading edge of technology. If a disaster can occur in Japan, it can feasibly happen an…

Of course the probability is never 0,00%. But it is obvious that the Fukushima accident happened due to geological factors. The same power plant would hum away nicely in Germany to this day, where there is little to no seismic activity and none on the scale of what happened in Fukushima.

Shoved the critical electrical stuff below the sea level... It's not like the reactors have fallen into a sudden volcano.
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