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?

#591

Post by GekkePrutser » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #507

GekkePrutser wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But unforeseen factors are always a component of accidents. Otherwise it wouldn't be an accident. Of course boost is planning for this to happen. The point is that it does happen despite planning. It won't happen in the same way in Germany but something else can happen.

But the problems were very much foreseen! The chief architect of the Fukushima plant tried hard to convince his bosses that the wall which protects the plant is not tall enough to protect against rare but possible huge tsunami waves, but hasn't been heard. He turned out to be right. The plant also had emergency cooling pumps, but the pumps were connected incorrectly. This was unforeseen, I can give you that. In any c…

That makes it even worse though! If the problems were foreseen but willfully ignored.

It goes to show that even in developed countries corruption happens and this is a major liability to nuclear plants. If it can happen there it can happen anywhere.

And deaths aren't the only measure of accidents. It also caused major pollution.

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

#592

Post by Manfredo_1 » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #588

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing hydrogen is much more complicated than storing methane. Not to mention the challenge of moving hydrogen from the production location (probably close to a river), to the storage site. Hydrogen rapidly corrodes metals, turning them into metal hydrides. Hydrogen molecules are small, and they permeate through metals effectively increasing surface area. Even if storage is widespread, transport is challenging. Hydr…

> Storing hydrogen is much more complicated than storing methane. Not really. It has lower energy/mole. There is the possibility that if CO2 is present that microorganisms could react the two to make methane. But aside from that, where is this much greater complexity coming from? The equipment required for storing either is similar. Hydrogen is already dealt with on a very large scale. If expanded to STP, the amount…

> But aside from that, where is this much greater complexity coming from?

Did you read my post? Because I explain how it's permeability and corrosion make it challenging to build long lasting containers to store hydrogen.

It's not the same technology to store methane. Methane can be liquified and kept as a liquid at room temperature. Hydrogen cannot, it must either be kept as a gas (drastically reducing it's energy density per liter) or cryogenically cooled. The scale at which it is produced, stored, and transported is not even remotely close to natural gas.

Show me where you get this figure that 700 cubic kilometers of hydrogen is produced yearly? And even if it is, using it for energy storage is much more challenging than using it for things like chemical production because the latter doesn't involve storing hydrogen for long periods of time.

The amount of hydrogen produced yearly doesn't hold a torch to Methane. 3.9 trillion cubic meters of natural gas are consumed yearly [1]. This works out to 2.7 trillion KG or 297 billion tons. By comparison, 70 million tons of hydrogen are produced annually [2]. We produce over 4000 times as much natural gas as hydrogen annually. I have no idea where you getting this idea that the hydrogen economy and natural gas economies are remotely close to the same scale.

> This is not Power Point technology of the kind you find in pro-nuclear arguments.

You're right, pro-nuclear arguments don't need to hand-wave away severe technological limitations. Because it actually works, and there are real-world examples of it working.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/282717/global-natural-ga...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#:~:text=....

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

#593

Post by Manfredo_1 » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #577

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making yourself perfectly clear, you're just wrong about the claim that smart grids will improve heating: * With my normal thermostat I set my home to be heated to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. When it falls below 68 degrees it gets heated. * With a smart thermostat I set my home to be heated to 68 degrees. When it falls below that, it gets heated. There is zero difference between the behavior of a "smart" thermostat…

No you don't understand. The power company can heat your home warmer than 68°F when the electricity is plentiful so that it can wait longer with heating when the electricity is scare.

Okay, so now I have to pick between dealing with excessive heat during the day, or cold at night because our infrastructure can't fulfill energy demand.

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

#594

Post by shadowgovt » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #253

AI_WAIFU wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first working nuclear reactor was hastily cobbled together in a tennis court. It's literally just a critical mass of inexpensive magic rocks, a control system, and some way to remove the heat. The only reason it costs so much is precisely because everyone is paranoid, so we demand expensive security systems and protocols. If the regulators got out of the way you could probably put one together for a few million d…

We could, but we shouldn't. The fact that we can is probably the reason for the fears around the reactor. People don't fear the technical limitations of a well-build and well-managed safe reactor, and those can be built. But they fear the danger of the corruption and corner-cutting in some countries which is very difficult to constrain, which will lead to building an unsafe reactor.

And the consequences of building such a reactor.

At the height of the Chernobyl disaster, calculations were suggesting a vast swath of Europe could be rendered uninhabitable by humans for several generations in the melt-to-groundwater-detonation scenario. As it stands, an area of diameter slightly smaller than the length of Manhattan is still considered high-risk for permanent habitation.

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

#595

Post by makomk » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

vianneychevalie wrote: post #200

aidenn0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also seems to be a problem because the US seems to have gotten much worse at building fixed structures (bridges, buildints &c.) over the last 100 year. Some of that cost is probably due to better workplace safety, but some of that cost has come in the past 40 years, and I don't feel like OSHA has tightened the screws that much in the psat 40 years.

Not only the US. The Flamanville EPR has suffered increased costs because the welders that actually learned how to do nuclear-level welds had retired by the time someone decided to build a new nuclear reactor after Chernobyl. Additionally, the foundries that build a key part of the nuclear core (I belive it’s called a chaudron in French, but it’s basically a big metal boiler) were not as good as they were, because th…

I think you may have missed the punchline in the story of the defective castings for the Flamanville reactor pressure vessel: the foundry responsible were exactly as good as they used to be, their previous castings going back decades and in use at existing nuclear power plants had similar defects, and they'd just managed to cover it up for all that time. I suspect the same might be true of some of the welding on the existing nuclear fleet too; they've definitely discovered some welding defects.

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

#596

Post by fulafel » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 6:32 PM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #494

m4rtink wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like I said, US had commissioned around 20 of those reactors in the past couple decades.

How is the cost per MWh in construction and ops?

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

#597

Post by fulafel » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

mycall wrote: post #109

icedistilled wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Oh don't forget the other issue: It takes decades to build a new plant. We don't got that time. For the $6 Billion or more it takes to build a nuclear plant that will then take 15 to 20 years to license and build before it generates a single Watt, we could have had a $6 Billion of solar and wind deployed and operating for 12+ ye…

If we had enough solar to power the world, would all of the solar cells actually lower the temperature of Earth due to being black?

Possibly if we channeled the generatef power off-planet using eg high efficiency lasers.

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

#598

Post by fulafel » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

glogla wrote: post #302

rgbrenner wrote: post #149

BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time y…

Comparing nuclear (available 24/7) with solar without storage (available only in during the day only in some seasons) seems tricky - of course the solar will be cheaper. It doesn't cover all the need though. And storage is mostly unsolved problem at scale. Nobody in the world ever built GWh size battery. So supporting solar means you're either suggesting going with stuff that doesn't exist (and might as well go with…

Most of demand isn't absolute need, the rest is just dynamic pricing and adapting consumption to it by eg intra day shifting of heating/cooling/charging loads.

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

#599

Post by adrianN » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #593

adrianN wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you don't understand. The power company can heat your home warmer than 68°F when the electricity is plentiful so that it can wait longer with heating when the electricity is scare.

Okay, so now I have to pick between dealing with excessive heat during the day, or cold at night because our infrastructure can't fulfill energy demand.

Or you simply put a comfortable range of temperatures in your smart thermostat.

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

#600

Post by willis936 » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #579

willis936 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first part is very likely wrong. Fusion won’t be a major grid player in this century and by extension may be “too late” for meaningful climate change. However, we may be more fucked than people think. Seasonal energy storage (10^14 Wh scale) has no solutions. Where are the low carbon alternatives to base load power production? The second part is entirely wrong. That only applies to IEF programs in the US. NIF is…

You seem to be saying that all that is needed to conceal weapons-targeted budgeting from you is to label it "EIF"?

Sorry I should have said “ICF”: inertial confinement fusion. IEC is inertial electrostatic confinement. It’s a confusing set of acronyms that are easy to fumble.

NIF has always been a weapons project. It was made to step around test ban treaties. That’s how it was bankrolled. It’s time on energy research is up and its current primary objective is to keep a team of nuclear weapons experts sharp. The next largest ICF machine is tiny by comparison. I don’t generalize “all ICF machines”, but NIF is the representative of the technology, similar to W7-X for stellarators and ITER for tokamaks.