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New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

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Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#61
post #55
post #3

Unpopular opinion (though getting less so): the politicization of nuclear energy in the 1960s and the resulting lack of investment & R&D advances may go down as one of the biggest blunders in human history. Even with some modest ongoing investments, we'd have designs that are FAR safer than systems currently in operation.

It's not only about safety though. A big problem with nuclear is the centralization it entails. Big, centrally controlled power, in contrast with localizable options like solar, lends itself to heavy handed state control, big industry exploitation, corruption, and just general top-down control of consumer options. I prefer technologies like solar, which can be installed and controlled locally by the property owner th…

Renewables are still prone to centralisation. A large solar farm connected to a wide area grid is just more valuable than a lot of little schemes. And the same will be true of battery storage. If it is economic to I stall 1MW locally, it will be even more profitable to install 1GW next to a large substation.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#62
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes... is this an American phrasing? I (from UK) would definitely write this as "renewables and nuclear".

No. This is Vox phrasing to drum up controversy. They do this crap all the time.

To be fair, if you clicked through, it wasn't Vox's phrasing but the original poster's.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#63
post #9
post #2

Nukes makes it sound like they want nuclear missiles but this is about nuclear energy...

Yes... is this an American phrasing? I (from UK) would definitely write this as "renewables and nuclear".

This isn't American phrasing just the original poster's bad title.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This is Vox phrasing to drum up controversy. They do this crap all the time.

To be fair, if you clicked through, it wasn't Vox's phrasing but the original poster's.

My bad. I did click through but didn't re-read the headline. Just assumed it was the same based on Vox's history with clickbait BS.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#66
post #61
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only about safety though. A big problem with nuclear is the centralization it entails. Big, centrally controlled power, in contrast with localizable options like solar, lends itself to heavy handed state control, big industry exploitation, corruption, and just general top-down control of consumer options. I prefer technologies like solar, which can be installed and controlled locally by the property owner th…

Renewables are still prone to centralisation. A large solar farm connected to a wide area grid is just more valuable than a lot of little schemes. And the same will be true of battery storage. If it is economic to I stall 1MW locally, it will be even more profitable to install 1GW next to a large substation.

But with solar, both options are available. I’d much rather have that flexibility without being forced to swallow a huge nuclear project or even small mini reactors infesting my area.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#67
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money was spent on it, building it, operating it, cleaning it up, and losing what had been invested in the region around it? How have these costs have been passed on to the Japanese population as taxes, fees, or in other ways? I don't think we'll ever know. If you are arguing that because you missed something, then the figure is zero, I don't think that's a reasonable argument. I don't think that is what you…

Today. The policy decisions we are talking about were made decades ago, when nuclear was an established (although young) industry, are renewables were decades away from being viable. The damage is done. Building nuclear now won't fix it. But with the benifit of hindsight (and the benifit of arguing for the counterfactual), but strangling nuclear power decades ago was a regulatory mistake with literally disasterous co…

We will never know what other disasters we fortunately avoided though. And the automotive industry would have kept pushing gas cars, and we would not have averted global warming. I mean... here you are, saying we have a disaster looming, and what kind of car do you drive? Just playing the odds, probably an ICE car.

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#68
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today. The policy decisions we are talking about were made decades ago, when nuclear was an established (although young) industry, are renewables were decades away from being viable. The damage is done. Building nuclear now won't fix it. But with the benifit of hindsight (and the benifit of arguing for the counterfactual), but strangling nuclear power decades ago was a regulatory mistake with literally disasterous co…

We will never know what other disasters we fortunately avoided though. And the automotive industry would have kept pushing gas cars, and we would not have averted global warming. I mean... here you are, saying we have a disaster looming, and what kind of car do you drive? Just playing the odds, probably an ICE car.

Throwing some numbers out.

In 2018, nuclear accounted for 4% of global energy production [0]. Since we have been shifting away from nuclear, this represents an underestimation.

Going back to Chernobyl, we have had 2 class 7 nuclear incidents. Scaling this up 25x, this gives us about 1 class 7 nuclear incident every 8 months; assuming no advances in safety occurred since the 70s, when both plants were built. For simplicity, I will round this down to twice a year.

So, how bad are these class 7 disasters? According to WHO estimations [1], Fukushima caused an estimated 0 acute deaths from radiation; 400 long-term deaths from radiation and 1,600 deaths from evacuations (I suspect elevated due to the trigger tsunami). For reference, the trigger natural disaster had about 15,897 deaths [2].

So, in terms of casualties, Fukushima made a natural disaster ~10% worse.

In terms of cost, Fukushima is estimated to cost about $187 billion USD in decommisioning and compensation (Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, 2016) [3]. In addition, the disaster also caused an estimated $266 billion USD in fuel imports to replace the lost power (as of 2016, so 5.5 years of imports); I should discount the hypothetical operating cost of Fukushima, but can't find the numbers for that.

So, to get to 100% nuclear power, we are looking at 2 Fukushima's a year. That is 3,200 deaths and $374 billion USD a year. (In practice, this would not work because there are grid problems once nuclear becomes a significant chunk of power production, but we are really talking about the margin; just extrapolating out to make the numbers clearer). Also, these costs are concentrating in the near term to the incidents, so will go down fairly quickly once we shift away from nuclear.

I was going to compare this to global warming, but it is hard to find good estimates on the damage, and this comment is also already involving much more research then I intenended to do.

In 2010, an estimated 3,000 people died from fine particle pollution from US power plants. [4]. This already almost exceeds are estimate for annual global deaths from nuclear power, so I can stop looking for all the other deaths non-nuclear power causes.

Estimating the cost of not nuclear is more difficult, and at this point I already spent way too much time on this.

I would, however, like to reiterate that this analysis started with me (in my judgment) comically overestimating the cost of the counter-factual nuclear disasters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

[3] https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/836/econom...

[4] https://www.catf.us/educational/coal-plant-pollution/

Re: New York state wants both renewables and nuclear energy (2016)

#69
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not renewable in any sense of the word! Renewable doesn't mean "clean" (and there's an argument to be made that nuclear isn't even clean, but I digress). Renewable means an energy source that literally renews itself. To avoid breaking the second law of thermos that implies there is an energy source (Sun) that recharges the renewable energy source with energy that would otherwise be wasted, therefore, you cannot…

Sun is powered by nuclear power.

And it isn't renewable either.
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