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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

#671

Post by nickik »

Spooky23 wrote: post #357
ekianjo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so what is the alternative in the meantime? Everyone breathing coal particles and many people dying of lung cancer before their time? How is the current energy production safe by anY standards? did you even read the article ?

Natural gas, wind, solar, hydro where available.

Hydro is mostly used up in the developed world, it will never go far.

Wind and solar can not even cover all the required growth, specially not outside of the developed world.

Natural gas is a good option, specially to replace coal.

Modern nuclear plants however would be even better.

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

#672

Post by nickik »

Spooky23 wrote: post #432
payne92 wrote: post #13

I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…

We would be in a better place with respect to greenhouse gasses. But we're also subject to long term disposal of waste products and high risk of pollution of groundwater, and other water sources. Some of those risks will be risks for thousands of years. The typical answers from nuclear proponents never cover what to do with the waste product.

Nuclear waste is nuclear fuel.

Also new reactor types have solved all these problems. They can create very little waste that only has to be stored a far shorter time.

The problem is that anti-nuclear people have created a environment where no more research happens and old technology just limps along.

The science is clear, the needed technology is understood, we just need somebody to build it. There are startups who try, but its very difficult.

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

#673

Post by nickik »

oconnor663 wrote: post #165
amluto wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima was a boiling water reactor, which is not a good design. A good design would be passively safe, which more or less means that you can turn off the plant and walk away without a disaster occurring.

Were the safer designs available in 1971?

Yes they were. Liquid Fuel Molten Salt reactors had been build and tested. The researches were ready to start building production scale units next.

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

#674

Post by nickik »

padseeker wrote: post #139
payne92 wrote: post #13

I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…

I bet Fukushima was pretty damn safe, maybe one of the best nuclear power plants designed. The best designs cannot account for everything. There is always a risk of an accident, and you need consider not just accidental but intentional mishaps (dirty bombs). Very low risk of something happening is not the same is the damaged caused if that risk becomes a reality.

The best designs can remove hole categories of errors. Different reactor types can be passively save and carry virtually zero risk catastrophic failure.

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

#675

Post by nickik »

appleiigs wrote: post #468
beat wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Completely eliminates the possibility" sounds like something a supervillain would say. I'm not saying that this passive safety system won't work, or is a bad idea. It sounds great from the brief description. BUT. There's a terrible, terrible tendency of the pro-nuclear side to use bombastic language, and then sneer at those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical. Pricing promises are another probl…

The senior engineer at my company was from Duke Energy. At the beginning of the Fukushima incident he loudly proclaimed that the safety mechanisms would kick in, preventing a disaster. He held educational session during lunch so he could explain the engineering. We all know the rest of the story.

That just means he was an idiot. The problems of the design were well known. The potential failure points were well known and are part of the design. This is nothing new and has been understood for a long time.

A good initial design eliminates many of the complicated failure mechanism.

A molted salted liquid fueled Thorium reactor simply does not have these problems. Coming up with a scenario where it would fail at such a high level is hard to even imagine.

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

#676

Post by nickik »

Apofis wrote: post #545
Recurecur wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown. LFRs include an electrically cooled salt plug that seals a holding tank. If power fails, the molten salt melts the plug, and the fuel safely drains into the tank. I particularly like ThorCon's concept, where the reactor is underground. Another plus of this reactor type is that water cooling isn't needed, so siting is much more flexible. Note that t…

I feel like when a company says 10 years away it generally means that the company is still looking for funding... and 5 years away generally means they finally got the funding and are now building and experimenting. China also says 10 years away for the LFR, but I've heard murmors of 5-7 years from a few articles... meaning they likely are finally starting to get some investment.

Its hard to compete in the nuclear business when literally everything else, including useless stuff like ethanol get subsidies like crazy. Also, existing regulation made much of this research impossible.

With the subsidies and research fund wind and solar have gotten we could have LFR easy by now.

Its also hard to sell nuclear when most nation want buy it, either because they can't, want to produce their own, or are against it.

The fact is LFR offer unlimited energy supply at minimal fuel cost, it is green, stable, reliable, controllable and safe. We could have had it 50 years ago, but since then the deck has just been stacked against it and its hard to revive it.

So yes, the company is probably more then 10 years away, but if this was part of a national energy strategy, things would happen pretty fast.

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

#677

Post by nickik »

datenwolf wrote: post #163
mikeash wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the sources of CO2 for mining and all the rest? If it's electricity production then you're basically blaming nuclear for emissions from fossil fuel generation, since those would be much lower in an all-nuclear world. If it's transport then it's more justified, but when looking at how it could be in the future, transport can be electrified to close that loop.

It's mostly due to the chemistry required to liberate the Uranium from the ore. What you have in the ore is mostly Uranium oxides. You have to strip away those pesky oxygen atoms in order to further process the Uranium. And in that process quite the amount of CO2 is produced. Now keep in mind that this must be done to all the Uranium, before it undergoes enrichtment. So for every atom of U235 you get about 200 (give…

Throrium is produced anyway as a waste product. No additional mining is needed.

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

#678

Post by nickik »

okreallywtf wrote: post #455
beat wrote: post #369

Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses. Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or be…

This is the thing I don't get about nuclear proponents. While I'm not an opponent, we can scale sustainable energy sources now, we could have a Manhattan project type of program that, while costly, could replace the majority of our energy sources as fast as we can manufacture the panels and turbines. There is so much lead time in building a nuclear plant, it costs so much and then continues to be pretty costly in mai…

With a couple of years of development effort we could build a medium sized nuclear reactor that would be extremely save, extremely fuel, cheap fuel (essentially free), extremely reliable and it would solve availability issues.

You can literally mass produce the reactor and send it to standardized facilities all over the place, on or of the grid.

This would not even be very costly, a robust reactor development program to start with and some commercialization of the tech and regulatory change to allow it. No Manhatten projected needed.

I think doing what you suggest and replacing all coal and natural gas plants with reliable energy is pretty insane in comparison. Not to mention that that is only the easy part of the problem. I don't know a reliable way to solve the availability issue. The only close to viable approach is Musk-Style mass production of batteries. Even that is only viable if we continue to make leap and bounds improvements to batteries.

This is about solving the energy needs of 10 Billion people in this century. A Manhattan style mass production of solar cells and wind turbines will not get it done.

Thorium has the highest energy density and its practically unlimited, both in the ground and we already mine it. It simply is not that hart do build a modular reactor that can be mass produced. We know it works, and we know that it solved all the problem we have, including availability, pollution and global warming.

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

#679

Post by nickik »

beat wrote: post #258
scottLobster wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breeder reactors have been around since the dawn of nuclear energy and are extremely efficient, re-using the bulk of harmful waste material as fuel. If we built more of those waste would be far less of a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet suppo…

Nobody builds breeder reactors (except for generating weapons-grade materials) because they are seriously unsafe . I'm not anti-nuclear, but the idea of using breeders for civilian power generation is lunacy. There's a very good reason no one does that. The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that…

That breeders are unsafe is simply wrong as a general statement.

A Thorium or Uranium based liquid fuel molten salt reactor is incredibly save and highly viable for civilian power generation.

> The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on.

You massively underestimate the political and economical problems of these things. There are many different types of reactors and other ideas that have never managed to get to market.

Until very shorty it was basically impossible to develop one in the US. The Department of Energy would not grant anything, not even use of labs to anybody who wanted to research it. Much of the research itself was basically lost for a long time.

> Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either.

China is massively investing molten salt reactors, including liquid fuel thorium. They plans are pretty big.

Also, there are simple not that many people who do this kind of stuff. The early research was done in the US and most other piggyback of that and have continued to make marginal improvements.

> Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.

India has tried earlier but failed. The reason was that they did not have the advanced science, not some fundamental problem. The went in another direction because they felt it was easier. The same problem did not apply to the US.

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