571–580 of 1001 posts
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"For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository." Because apparently no country wants to be the dumpster for the radioactive waste of the others? I wonder why that is, when it is a solved problem.
Because it’s not a solved problem and people saying so are repeating propaganda
Two things to keep in mind when thinking about nuclear 1) Has the lowest deaths/TWH: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... 2) Any country that is not US absolutely needs to invest in nuclear technology. This is for your own security. In addition to providing energy security, it also provides physical security (with a bit more work). Without nuclear, your country will remain vulnerable to: 1)…
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Waste management has been solved problem. "A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository "The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP…
Every time someone mentions a year where nuclear started being "safe," I find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment, plus plenty of near misses. Broader than waste though. Maybe focus on how the likely alternatives are worse. The world isn't going to run completely on renewables, and coal puts surefire poison AND radioactive isotopes in…
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Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…
Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.
Imagine having ports all around the country where a sub can plug in and provide power. Instead of building massive ports to ship stored energy (coal, oil, gas) from somewhere else in the world, its much easier to just have a plug in port and access nuclear energy.
All countries have their own fleet, but can also tap into a global fleet. There is a small problem with clean energy, long term seasonal storage and disruptive events. Germans have a word for it. Dunkelflaute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
With EV batteries as an enormous reservoir of energy storage (dump all excess production when electricity is priced negative; use the EV batteries instead of peaker plants) and nuclear subs, the transition to clean energy can be complete.
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I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it. I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
"we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" isn't this proven to be true? better for the country, worse for a small amount of directly affected people?
But then China expanded outside of cheap low-value-add goods and started to get into higher-value-add goods, and started directly competing with our industries in those spaces. They could source stuff cheaper and put major chunks of industry out of business. Now the US is a service economy, has major problems with cranking out large quantities of high-quality goods, and the Chinese are starting to look at Taiwan with even more malicious intent.
Now Europe seems to want to sign up for the same package, because of supposed American political and diplomatic instability, even though the instability is the US government acting at home more and more like the Chinese government does (censorship, thin-skinned leadership, excessive exercise of the state's monopoly on violence, etc.).
Nothing to be done about it. The continent will have to learn the hard way, as we did.
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Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless? A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they bei…
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Not sure if that's fair. Sometimes the sun actually does shine, and while you won't get rich selling energy during that time, having electricity available essentially for free during some of the peak hours is worth something. Someone will eventually find a use for free energy. If nothing else, at least we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.
> we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines. Those plants are not designed to be turned on and off, and both must be done gradually and carefully to avoid cracking the turbines.
A decent bunch of that is going to be sheer inertia as you have to spin up a heavy chunk of metal. Keep that rotating (which is actually a good thing in renewable-heavy grids!) and it can be done even faster. Similarly, keeping some parts warm costs very little energy and allows even faster ramp=up.
But that's actually not relevant because battery storage is far more attractive for that kind of short-term demand. The renewable grid will need gas plants which can fill in the gap left when it is both dark and wind-less - which due to meteorology is trivially known 72 hours in advance, leaving plenty of time to prepare the plant for use.
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With basically almost nothing coming online for decades and the handful of projects that do come online being late, hundreds of percent over budget, and delivering only a relatively tiny amount of power (relative to the equivalent of hundreds of new reactors worth of solar/wind/battery every year), it's hard to maintain that nuclear has any role whatsoever to play. No amount of magical thinking is going to change tha…
"Decades" is an extreme POV. Big tech companies are actively investing into nuclear power. Unlike those green renewables you described, nuclear runs almost nonstop. At least 90%+ of the time! Let's not forget about China, who can do it faster and cheaper compared to western standards. Obviously short term we'll be forced to use gas, renewables, etc. But saying nuclear will be irrelevant is wrong.. Reliable 24/7 clean…