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Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

nytimes.com

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Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#641

Post by _ph_ »

godelski wrote: post #636
_ph_ wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website I linked is the federal agency for nuclear safety. Depends entirely what you mean by "dangerous levels". It is contaminated enough, that mushrooms from the forests are not allowed to be sold as food. Yes, a single serving won't have a significant impact on your health, but it is recommended not to eat much of them. The situation is worse with some wild boar, which eat a lot of those mushrooms and accumula…

Dangerous levels has an exact definition. The EU sets them at 20mSv/yr. To put that in perspective, 1Sv is equivalent to a 5% increase in chance of getting cancer during your lifetime (granted, that dose needs to be spread out). So you can see that they keep it REALLY low. Extra safety is used because they use the linear no-threshold model. Yes, the model is linear so you can extrapolate easily. Those levels that aci…

>You also realize that over time these things degrade, right? Yes, with a half-time of 30 years.

>Not just by radioactive decay, but because organisms and chemical reactions break down the radioactive materials. We are talking about radioactive isotopes. Nothing short of a nuclear reaction is going to "break them down", certainly not organisms or chemical reactions

>You seem to be implying that over the many years it is getting worse. Which is just untrue (and frankly should not pass a smell test). No, I did no such thing. I said that wild boar is contaminated worse as they keep eating mushrooms for years while each mushroom only has a couple of days to aggregate radioactive isotopes.

>tldr: Trust the domain expert over some article you read on the internet. It wasn't "some article" I quoted, but the official information of the federal office for nuclear safety.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#642

Post by godelski »

_ph_ wrote: post #641
godelski wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dangerous levels has an exact definition. The EU sets them at 20mSv/yr. To put that in perspective, 1Sv is equivalent to a 5% increase in chance of getting cancer during your lifetime (granted, that dose needs to be spread out). So you can see that they keep it REALLY low. Extra safety is used because they use the linear no-threshold model. Yes, the model is linear so you can extrapolate easily. Those levels that aci…

>You also realize that over time these things degrade, right? Yes, with a half-time of 30 years. >Not just by radioactive decay, but because organisms and chemical reactions break down the radioactive materials. We are talking about radioactive isotopes. Nothing short of a nuclear reaction is going to "break them down", certainly not organisms or chemical reactions >You seem to be implying that over the many years it…

First off, fix your formatting. This is hard to read. You need two new lines to form one in HN, but it kinda looks like you already know that.

> Yes, with a half-time of 30 years.

Biological half lives tend to be A LOT shorter. It is something like 90 days in humans (for Cesium). There's also the uptake rate, which IIRC is about 10%.

> Nothing short of a nuclear reaction is going to "break them down", certainly not organisms or chemical reactions

Oh, sorry. I didn't realize that radiation means that electrons will no longer form bonds. That's really interesting. But I have a question. This being true, can you tell me how we get solids? Or are you saying that radioactive materials can only bind to other materials with similar radioactive properties? I can tell you that I never learned this in any of many physics classes nor while I was working as a radiation researcher. If this is a new study done by you I'm excited to see you win the Nobel. Really groundbreaking work.

> No, I did no such thing. I said that wild boar is contaminated worse as they keep eating mushrooms for years while each mushroom only has a couple of days to aggregate radioactive isotopes.

10% uptake, shorter biological half life. This isn't a system with positive feedback. The more degrees the more dilution. The Cs is in the ground, mushrooms eat that (1 degree), boars eat that (2 degrees), humans eat that (3 degrees). Minimum. We are assuming that the Cs is just laying nicely and not being diluted by worms and bugs before it is absorbed by the mushrooms.

> It wasn't "some article" I quoted, but the official information of the federal office for nuclear safety.

You're pulling from much more than that article. Your domain experts in this thread are breaking down that official information and explaining what things mean (note, neither of us have disputed it). For example, what is a Sievert? How dangerous is it? How much is safe? Can this be explained in a way without years of studying atomic physics and nuclear medicine?

What you're doing is reading that and saying "Look how dangerous this stuff is!" We're looking at it and saying "Ah cool, so as long as I don't eat 500 kilos of wild mushrooms in a year I'll be good". There's a big difference between these two points of view. But again, I'm not disputing what is in that documentation. I am drawing from it to demonstrate how safe things are.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#643

Post by peterashford »

I find the view that nuclear is the only clean option very odd when we have countries which are 100% renewable right now. And a number of countries which are very nearly there already. I see people raising issues about batteries but I'm not sure that a lot of the countries doing 100% or nearly so are using batteries at all. That looks like a straw-man to me

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#644

Post by peterashford »

kortilla wrote: post #616
pytester wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How I wish that was true. >What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal. It is true. Germany has already built its last coal fired power plant and has already mandated the closure of all 84 plants by 2020. Germany is already shifting to generating by renewables, demand…

Germany will just continue to cheat and import from France during lulls. Either that or they will just burn natural gas. Renewables (excluding dams because they aren’t supported by zealots) for base load are a complete fantasy. Pumped storage and batteries are so inefficient that we can’t switch without quintupling electricity costs for everyone. >It'll happen eventually. Nuclear is in no position to make it happen a…

Convenient to exclude hydro to make your argument where its what powers the existing the 100% renewable countries (either completely or nearly so).

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#645

Post by peterashford »

Amygaz wrote: post #527
belorn wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only the coal lobby wants to continue burning coal. Everyone else is like "No, that's stupid and self-harming, let's just not." How I wish that was true. What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal. As an example, when the choice is between being cold in Stockholm (Sw…

If you are mainly looking at an energy source for the downtimes, then there is currently enough hydro being generated to do that.

There are countries which are 100% renewable right now using hydro to do so, so yes.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#646

Post by peterashford »

jfnixon wrote: post #374
raz32dust wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the debate is now shifting from nuclear vs. coal to nuclear vs. solar/wind. In that context, this argument doesn't help. Especially recently, people have been really bullish about solar and wind power, and I think that has lead to weakening of the support for nuclear power.

You need to tell China and India that.

China is extraordinarily bullish on renewables. From wikipedia: "China's renewable energy sector is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity. ... In 2017, renewable energy comprised 36.6% of China's total installed electric power capacity, and 26.4% of total power generation, the vast majority from hydroelectric sources."

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#647

Post by peterashford »

option wrote: post #294
dorgo wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Per kw produced it is safer than even solar or wind how do you define "safer"?

less deaths. I was myself surprised when I learned this, but apparently people fall off while installing solar and wind; combine that with much smaller energy output and you'll get nuclear to be the safest

Rooftop solar is quite different to industrial solar plants. The latter is on the ground, for example. Also, the installation of the latter is less ad-hoc and not done by small scale operators. I don't think the safety of a large power plant vs lots of home power installations is at all a fair metric.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#648

Post by loeg »

pfdietz wrote: post #496
loeg wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables (and batteries) simply aren't that cheap. Even ignoring externalities like disposing of EOL solar panels.

Not yet. But if you extrapolate out the cost of solar. using the historical experience curve, as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there.

If you extrapolate this trend line far enough, does it reach zero? There's only so much future prediction you can accurately make from historical performance.

> as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there

And that's kind of the other problem. How much land is that?

Per this perhaps dated 2013 report[0],

It takes "3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year." Unclear on if that's only in sunny desert locales like California/Nevada, or average over the US, or whatever.

Anyway, if my math isn't radically incorrect, that comes out to 114 kW of capacity on average, in whatever these test conditions were.

Just 10 TW of capacity would require, uh, 1.2e12 m², or 13k "survey townships" (US land units get weird), or 466k "sections" (weird US land unit that equals mi²) or 298 million acres.

For some comparison, California is 164k mi². Texas is 269k. You could (hypothetically) cover the entirety of California and Texas with solar panels (433 mi²) and you still would not reach 10 TW of average production.

Admittedly, your scope is global and these examples are US states. But it is still a ton of land. Perhaps efficiency has increased slightly since 2013, but by a factor of 2 or more? 10? And how much space will we need in landfills for EOL panels?

Global demand was about 22,100 TWh/yr in 2011 (random figure), so say it's doubled since then; we'd still need something like 233k mi² of these panels to supply the world, assuming perfect capture from season to season and overnight. That's most of Texas in (2013) solar panels...

[0]: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#649

Post by roenxi »

Faark wrote: post #598
roenxi wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means my analysis is informed by a working knowledge of how we treat existing risk factors that affect human society. Everything I've seen suggests that in practice the macro-scale threat posed by radioactive material is similar to that posed by lead, but easier to deal with because the volumes are so tiny we can afford to isolate it completely from the biosphere. We produce tiny amounts of waste, I can't find a g…

Your numbers seem way off. My first google results [0] mentions a single plant producing more than 100,000m³ waste requiring special treatment. Most of it on the less bad end, though. Or are you just talking about fuel waste and conveniently ignore everything else? [1] compares solid waste from different power sources. Little info for solar/wind. Both nuclear and coal seem bad. But none of us wants to build coal plan…

I don't have any decent sources on waste. I wasn't ignoring decommissioning, but what I was trying to and failing to communicate was per-annum figures (comparing per annum production vs. the storage required over the same time period).

From a volumetric perspective compared to what we know how to handle industrially the numbers are tiny. I strongly suspect the only reason we treat the waste with such care is because there is so little of it that that sort of care is feasible.

I've seen a big lead mine in operation. I wouldn't live anywhere near to one of them, containing the waste is basically impossible. With nuclear waste, there is so little we could literally ship worldwide waste production to the middle of the Sahara and just dump it there. 100,000m³ just isn't that big a number - I mean, we wouldn't because it is a silly idea, not because we can't. It isn't a very responsible approach, but in practice it would work. The volumes are small enough that in my view world-wide nuclear waste storage crosses the boundary from a technical issue to an economic and political issue.

There are lots of uninhabitable wastelands that have been created here and there by industrial processes. One more in a location chosen to be remote would make literally no difference given the scale of the benefits. There are a lot of deserts out there.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#650

Post by pfdietz »

ineedasername wrote: post #577
epistasis wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO that's exactly wrong. The problem is far too much will, and not enough competence. This is the second forum where I've seen a "not enough will" comment, despite it making no sense when you look at the history of the excessive amounts of capital thrown unproductively at the task. Nuclear has some amazing lobbying going for it, amazing backers that will throw away billions of tens of billions of dollars into black…

As I said in my other reply, my comment was more in regards to infrastructure in general, not necessarily nuclear in particular. However, even there you're not completely right. Regardless of how much has been spent on failed/failing projects, many of these began their planning a decade or more in the past. Now, the tide has pretty much turned against nuclear power. More people oppose it than support it [0] [0] https…

The point is that lack of support didn't cause nuclear to fail; nuclear's failure caused the current lack of support.
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