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Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

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Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#641

Post by DrScump »

Retric wrote: post #513
Turing_Machine wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has about 200 warheads. The US has almost 7,000. The US has never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium, because they simply aren't well-suited for the purpose.

>never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj...

I think it is true (in the USA) but rather meaningless. I don't think we want commercial entities producing plutonium unsupervised by the military.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#642

Post by martinald »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #334
martinald wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and wind has a lot of 'negative externalities' though that are generally borne by the grid or other operators. I think the economics really work against it at high% penetration (30-40%+). The problem is that solar and wind requires backup generation, usually CCGT natural gas. This is ok until you scale higher and higher. You end up having CCGT only producing 20-40% of the time (to fill in for wind and solar bli…

Weirdly, every story I read about this as it starts to happen on windy/sunny weekends and holidays is headlined "Excess solar/wind blah blah" and when you read the story, there's still coal and gas powered electricity production happening at the same time. Even in your entirely hypothetical example you say they're having to pay natgas and coal to stop production. Is it just me or is that really weird? I mean turning…

Coal can't be shut down easily, it's incredibly expensive and inefficient to dial it up and down. Natgas is easier but still quite a slow process.

If you could turn gas and coal up and down in a few minutes, then perhaps you would have a point. But coal can take 6-24hrs and natgas 1-4hrs. It won't suddenly stop when you have a massive gust of wind.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#643

Post by ZeroGravitas »

martinald wrote: post #642
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weirdly, every story I read about this as it starts to happen on windy/sunny weekends and holidays is headlined "Excess solar/wind blah blah" and when you read the story, there's still coal and gas powered electricity production happening at the same time. Even in your entirely hypothetical example you say they're having to pay natgas and coal to stop production. Is it just me or is that really weird? I mean turning…

Coal can't be shut down easily, it's incredibly expensive and inefficient to dial it up and down. Natgas is easier but still quite a slow process. If you could turn gas and coal up and down in a few minutes, then perhaps you would have a point. But coal can take 6-24hrs and natgas 1-4hrs. It won't suddenly stop when you have a massive gust of wind.

Wind and solar generation are highly predictable on those timescales, you can find predicted and actual generation graphs from various sources. They're certainly more predictable than demand.

More realistic excuses I've heard are long term contracts, potentially with minimum run times for fossil plants. Which are therefore the actual problem at the moment.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#644

Post by _Tev »

hrktb wrote: post #411
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets take your car that is smashed, upside-down in a ditch. When you bought the car, did you think it was safe? Did it pass the government tests, even ones you think might be a bit ridiculous? Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch? In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty r…

What this car comparison is missing is that people accept cars getting crushed into flat metal sheets. Agree or not, as a society we have accepted that traffic accident is a problem we don't want to pay the price to solve. A "safe" car is just a mildly safer death trap. In comparison, people haven't accepted that reactors would go shit and somewhat kill hundreds of people and trash whole regions for hundreds of years…

You have your facts wrong.

Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds. The region got so small radiation dose it is already basically harmless ... Decontamination efforts will make it pass even irrational radiation safety levels within 10-20 years. "hundreds" of years is therefore stupid hyperbole.

Public has not accepted nuclear risks because it is ridiculously misinformed. Don't spread pointless fearmongering, please.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#645

Post by dragonwriter »

_Tev wrote: post #644
hrktb wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What this car comparison is missing is that people accept cars getting crushed into flat metal sheets. Agree or not, as a society we have accepted that traffic accident is a problem we don't want to pay the price to solve. A "safe" car is just a mildly safer death trap. In comparison, people haven't accepted that reactors would go shit and somewhat kill hundreds of people and trash whole regions for hundreds of years…

You have your facts wrong. Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds. The region got so small radiation dose it is already basically harmless ... Decontamination efforts will make it pass even irrational radiation safety levels within 10-20 years. "hundreds" of years is therefore stupid hyperbole. Public has not accepted nuclear risks because it is ridiculously misinformed. Don't spread pointless fear…

> Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds.

By official counts, 34 killed directly in the evacuation, 573 total, including indirectly, due to the disaster,and estimates are even with the evacuation, additional long-term cancer deaths due to the release could be in the 100+ range as well.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#646

Post by _Tev »

freeflight wrote: post #448
outworlder wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, would be sufficiently safe. Just not in Fukushima. It was hit by an earthquake. Reactor performed SCRAM correctly. Plant was ok. Tsunami hit. Fuel tanks were washed away. This should never have been an issue. If you are in a zone that's prone to tsunamis, you don't locate essential infrastructure where it can be hit by tsunamis. Everything went downhill from there. Including their inability to hook up generator…

> Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology. That's really where you want to put the blame? Don't you think that's a bit dishonest? Nobody is stopping the operators of plants from modernizing plants, nobody except the realities of economics. Don't kid yourself: If they can keep on running reactors with the least possible…

Billions of dollars to modernize plants? Where are you pulling that number from?

This is what parent meant - scaremongering (and resulting ridiculous hyperbole) destroys progress.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#647

Post by _Tev »

beat wrote: post #626
dpark wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has been discussed ad nauseam Then why are you claiming that you do not understand it? Yes, there are potential mitigations but there are major engineering concerns with large scale storage. You say that we can scale solar today but the reality is we can't yet. Nuclear is sustainable energy that we can scale now without additional concerns about also scaling energy storage. That's why people are interested.

I think we'll be able to solve the storage-grid engineering problems and scale solar faster than we would be able to scale nuclear. Nuclear is expensive to build.

Please compare it with how expensive energy storage is.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#648

Post by _Tev »

okreallywtf wrote: post #630
dpark wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has been discussed ad nauseam Then why are you claiming that you do not understand it? Yes, there are potential mitigations but there are major engineering concerns with large scale storage. You say that we can scale solar today but the reality is we can't yet. Nuclear is sustainable energy that we can scale now without additional concerns about also scaling energy storage. That's why people are interested.

But we can't really scale nuclear, not in any kind of reasonable time frame. Take this for example [1], billions of dollars and decades to finish. Nobody thinks there won't be a transition period where we have to use existing coal, natural gas and nuclear but in terms of what we should be investing in right now, sustainable should be the focus I think. I have no issue with new nuclear plants where it makes sense, but…

You forgot the link

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#649

Post by _Tev »

beat wrote: post #628
Regist wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time buying into this. What's the lifespan of an solar farm with equal output to a nuclear plant? We're about to approve nukes for 80 year life spans. Nuclear has super low operating cost and a long lifespan. The only real economic downside is how flipping expense they are to build and a major reason for that is we don't have much experience building them (because they've lasted so many decades). You're…

Are you arguing that a solar/wind grid can't be done, or just that it's going to be challenging?

It seems to me like he argues that scaling nuclear is mostly known (but expensive) problem.

And that scaling renewables is largely unexplored, and very likely similarly expensive problem.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#650

Post by mitchty »

beat wrote: post #417
mitchty wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the rest of the forseeable future exactly? If we use breeder reactors we can get the half life down to 500 years which is easily dealt with via stuff like glass entombment. The current nuclear waste solution is ignoring a lot of advances from the 90's.

Breeder reactors are ridiculously dangerous. There's a good reason nobody uses them except for weapons-grade material generation. They're also a major weapon proliferation problem, since it's easy to use them to generate weapons-grade material. Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?

Breeder reactors are as noted by acidburnNSA extremely safe.

And yes they're a weapons grade problem, thats the point, if we want to store nuclear "waste", which to be honest is just unused nuclear fuel. The way to do that is to make it more radioactive so that its half life is lower.

It is a tradeoff, if we wish to complain about storing unspent nuclear fuel for 10 000 years, we have to accept that we are willingly ignoring other options that can solve that problem of long term storage.

> Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?

Is there a specific insinuation here? Why do you consider this a constructive way of arguing your point whatever it may be?

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