Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation? • Hacker News Board

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

#531

Post by VBprogrammer » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #521

VBprogrammer wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can really quote prices when you are talking about battery capacities on the order of the current world wide lithium battery production. Also, it's interesting that Iceland, with their abundance of geothermal power, don't have an interconnection with Europe. That's only 1000km as the crow flies and yet hasn't been considered economically feasible yet.

There is no lithium shortage. E.g. Tesla is basically mining in Nevada in a place that has apparently more than enough for their quite ambitious roadmap. Also money quote from Elon Musk last week was that it's one of the most common elements in the world. Basically, we've only scratched the surface (quite literally) in terms of actively looking for the stuff as the demand for lithium at this scale is a fairly recent…

You have to be very careful with claims about relative abundance. Take water as an example, 2/3 of our planets surface is covered in it and yet for practical purposes it's useless to us for drinking or watering crops. Regardless, I didn't make any claim about abundance of lithium, only the current manufacturing capacity.

My point about Iceland is they already have huge amounts of geothermal power and they should be able to develop it and sell it back to Europe as green electricity. Currently 70% of their power consumption is used to smelt aluminium so it's not like they are constrained.

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

#532

Post by Manfredo_1 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #417

FooHentai wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space. Nuclear plants take energy sequestered in matter and unleashes it to a form that ultimately will decay to heat just the same. This outcome is the same regardless of the power source. If climate change is a relevant concern to the discussion then alongside discussing of sustainable energy there's an equal topic of ho…

And nuclear plants release 2 units of waste heat energy for every 1 unit of electrical energy they produce. A solar field, if its efficiency > the albedo of the ground on which it was built, causes net local cooling. In both cases the produced power is eventually degraded to heat (in the grid and at the consumer), but the overall burden for direct global thermal pollution is lower for solar than for nuclear. Note, of…

The direct global thermal pollution for both solar panels and nuclear are negligible compared to the 100-200 petawatts of light hitting the earth constantly.

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

#533

Post by cameldrv » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #288

adrianN wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can avoid a lot of storage requirements by making your grid smarter and electrifying transportation and heating. 60% renewables are possible with hardly any storage at all, certainly less than 12 hours. Shifting demand is always cheaper than storage. Once you've electrified transportation, you have hundreds of millions of car batteries that can help out with demand spikes. That distributes the high upfront cost o…

Electrifying heating doesn't improve this situation, it worsens it drastically. People come back home after work and turn on the heat or AC right as the sun goes down. A big part of why renewable generation is so high in Germany is because they mostly heat their homes with gas (which emits carbon, but doesn't factor into electricity generation statistics). Using car batteries for storage doesn't solve the fundamental…

Agree about the car batteries. If you think about the storage problem in a less abstract way, it's largely shifting demand from around noon when the sun is shining to about 7-8pm when people are active but solar is producing zero.

For car battery storage to help with this, the car has to be plugged in while its owner is at work to soak up the noonday power, and then plugged in again at home to be discharged. By the time most people go to work in the morning, there isn't enough sun to charge the car yet, so they have to go to work without whatever power has been taken out of the battery at night, so the battery has to be bigger than is necessary for driving.

This extra battery capacity in the car is much more expensive. It's not 100% available, because sometimes people won't plug in their car, and it has to be made more rugged to deal with driving on the road. You're also paying an energy cost to haul an energy storage system to and from the office every day.

Overall, you'd do better by just using large scale fixed battery banks that can be optimized for energy storage. The only real reason to like vehicle based energy storage is that it takes the cost of energy storage off the books of renewable generation and hides it in transportation costs.

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

#534

Post by Manfredo_1 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

jusssi wrote: post #530

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't going to be cheap. But it is feasible, and if you care about carbon I'm not sure how else you do it. How about we use the carbon free method of generating electricity that France has used to generate most of it's electricity for close to half a century? We don't have to wait for a miracle that makes batteries cheaper, we don't have to scale up battery production by several orders of magnitude. If we buil…

Sure. Just make sure you don't ask the French to build your plants. It's 2020 now and we're still waiting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

Cherry-picking an individual plant doesn't change the fact that France produces electricity with much less carbon than most other countries, and often at an even cheaper cost.

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

#535

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #532

pfdietz wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And nuclear plants release 2 units of waste heat energy for every 1 unit of electrical energy they produce. A solar field, if its efficiency > the albedo of the ground on which it was built, causes net local cooling. In both cases the produced power is eventually degraded to heat (in the grid and at the consumer), but the overall burden for direct global thermal pollution is lower for solar than for nuclear. Note, of…

The direct global thermal pollution for both solar panels and nuclear are negligible compared to the 100-200 petawatts of light hitting the earth constantly.

Right. It's not any immediate global concern.

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

#536

Post by loufe » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

Matumio wrote: post #361

ncmncm wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries are only the most of expensive of many candidates for energy storage. But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate.

One potential alternative to batteries might be to build a couple of towers lifting concrete blocks up and down: https://energyvault.com/#operating-parameters

My research into this a little while ago showed that this has a very poor energy density to capital cost. There are some other techs like molten salt which are supposed to be better.

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

#537

Post by DoctorOetker » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

jka wrote: post #375

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't going to be cheap. But it is feasible, and if you care about carbon I'm not sure how else you do it. How about we use the carbon free method of generating electricity that France has used to generate most of it's electricity for close to half a century? We don't have to wait for a miracle that makes batteries cheaper, we don't have to scale up battery production by several orders of magnitude. If we buil…

Your arguments are the most compelling I've seen so far for more nuclear as opposed to renewables. I'm still leaning towards renewables for various reasons, but could be swayed - could you share any more details about where the 12 hour capacity requirement and costs mentioned come from?

please don't be swayed, he uses lots logical phallusese, in this thread for example: taking the US electric consumption at face value as being the power to be displaced 12 hours.

note how this assumes that every joule you consume must have come from the storage system as if there were zero overlap between consumption and demand such that all energy had to pass indirectly through the battery system

also note how he typically treats reminders by others as claims of silver bullet panaceas: even if governments had devoted to fully switching to renewables and had solid plans distributed over multiple sources (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, ...) and over multiple storage systems (synthetic fuel, batteries, flywheels, ...) in a way it sufficed our needs, it's not surprising that pointing at just one energy source or just one storage type, you'd arrive to the conclusion batteries, or solar won't suffice... even though in combination they might.

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

#538

Post by xyzzyz » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #379

koheripbal wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show me the costs associated with decommisioning a hydro electric dam? This is a hurdle people are only throwing in front of nuclear plants. Nuclear plants can run indefinitely if maintained - just like all major infrastructure.

I think we should be building nuclear everywhere, but it's important to realise the life of a nuclear power plant is between 20 to 40 years. https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf > It is evident that the average age of power reactors in the IAEA's Member States is increasing. (See accompanying graphs.) By 2000, more than 50 nuclear plants will have been providing electricity for 25 years or longer.…

> I think we should be building nuclear everywhere, but it's important to realise the life of a nuclear power plant is between 20 to 40 years.

This is simply untrue. Just look at French fleet. 40 years is minimum of their planned lifetime, and they probably will be operated for 50 or maybe even 60 years.

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

#539

Post by dv_dt » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

necheffa wrote: post #513

dv_dt wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare vs renewables not coal.

Renewables are not a silver bullet either. There are plenty of nasty things that go into building batteries and solar panels with no where near the attention to safely disposing them. Plus, renewables just can't handle baseload and load follow the way fossil or nuclear can.

Battery storage follows load much faster than fossil, and nuclear can't follow at all.

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

#540

Post by Retric » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #309

Retric wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mostly just a problem in the minds of the general public. Individual nuclear fuel rods get significantly less radioactive over time as short half life byproducts decay. Which makes both reprocessing and long term sequestration cheaper. Storing them for ~100 years is relatively cheap and can be funded ahead of time, so punting the issue seems quite reasonable IMO.

Well, sure, we are lucky that the waste from nuclear reactors is primarily solid heavy metals rather than fly ash or anything else, so we can just plunk them into pools and forget about them for a while. But eventually it makes sense to do something with all that waste.

Reprocessing doesn’t actually get rid of the highly radioactive waste though. You have exactly as much Caesium-137 and all the other nasty fission products before and after reprocessing, all it does is separate the waste you need to store from the useful fuel while contaminating all your reprocessing equipment. As we have plenty of fuel so that not particularly valuable.