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The Nuclear Option

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Re: The Nuclear Option

#81

Post by sasavilic »

gambiting wrote: post #77
sasavilic wrote: post #73

One thing we always keep forgetting: spent nuclear fuel, which is highly radioactive. It has to be kept safe for years and somehow I don't this is really calculated into price of nuclear electricity. But if we had a reactor that wouldn't have issue with highly radioactive waste, then it would be a different story.

Please remember that burning coal also leaves behind dangerous and mildly radioactive waste, that's usually not protected in any way or form - it just sits there, washed away by rain and blown away by rain. Where I'm from(Silesia region of Poland) the ash hills are permanent feature of the landscape, and a short trip with a Geiger counter shows easily that they have higher radiation level than background. It's not ve…

I am not against nuclear per se, only against current nuclear technology. I think that if we want to stick to nuclear, we need to heavily invest in technology, that would be more safe and would not produce long term highly radioactive nuclear waste. If those issues are solved, I am all in.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#82

Post by heyjudy »

Worked in nuclear industry in the late 90's. Most *WR designs are inherently not fail-safe, complex, require dedicated teams, are nearly impossible to insure and require a massive capex investment. This isn't necessary. Modern MSR/LFTR designs tend to get around most of these problems by being smaller, simpler and most robus, similar to what some startups, Taylor Wilson proposed and partially what ANP/ASTR/MSRE/DMSR proved. Downsides to many small reactors include more, smaller sites needing physical/SCADA security and more geographically-diffuse waste handling. Upsides include no exploding containment vessels and consumption of HEU down-blended.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#83

Post by jacobush »

godelski wrote: post #62
rurounijones wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a sidenote. I also have trouble understanding the mindset of people who argue purely on economic basis. It seems that telling out grandchildren "Sorry you inherited a ruined climate, but we didn't want to spend the money at the time to avoid it" is a rational decision. (And hey, maybe some people think it is; but I can't)

I honestly think they fall into one of 2 camps: 1) They don't believe in anthropocentric climate change (probably deflecting by taking this stance) 2) They don't believe the economic destructive power of climate change. Be that by disbelief, thinking it is over stated, or just not being good at thinking about the future (which a lot of humans aren't. We're terrible at it)

3) they think, but don't explicitly say, that externals should be priced in. But AnthonyMouse expressed the real dilemma quite well.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#84

Post by fulafel »

trimbo wrote: post #5

Sigh. I've been arguing this for so long, and gave up about 5 years ago. I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon, yet it won't happen for so many reasons. * There are too many solar and wind success stories to point to. "Why can't NYC be like Scotland with wind power?!" You start to list the reasons and the response is "we can accomplish it if we put our minds to it!". It's an endless cycle…

> I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon

I think it's a techno-optimism blindspot to prefer the "make more" solution to these things.

We waste enormous amounts of energy to non-essential things. Not just electricity production. Consider the electric cars craze. It's obviously just going to result in more emissions unless oil extraction ramps down at the same rate.

Solutions involving adaptation to lower consumption are met with protests like "then we would have to change our way of life", and for some reason that's perceived as a good argument.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#85

Post by crocal »

sasavilic wrote: post #73

One thing we always keep forgetting: spent nuclear fuel, which is highly radioactive. It has to be kept safe for years and somehow I don't this is really calculated into price of nuclear electricity. But if we had a reactor that wouldn't have issue with highly radioactive waste, then it would be a different story.

FWIW, Nuclear fuel reprocessing tech has been developed for that. I know the French version. It shrinks and stabilises the waste in the form of a special form of glass (of course radioactive). The entire waste generated since 50 years fits in a hangar waiting while politicians still argue about where to bury them for all eternity.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#86

Post by kijin »

sasavilic wrote: post #80
kijin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping radioactive waste far away from anyone who might be harmed by it, even for thousands of years, is a solved problem. We know how to bury stuff deep underground in a geologically stable region. Or if you prefer, throw it in a subduction zone. As with most things nuclear-related, the real problem is NIMBY. If a country as large and sparsely populated as the U.S. can't agree on a place to bury nuclear waste, ther…

I am not convinced that it is a solved problem. How old are Egyptian pyramids? Yet there is a lot of stuff that we don't know about them. We are confident, that after 20 000 years, people will still know about nuclear waste storage facilities? Think about it: records could be lost, our language will be different. Why are we so sure that somebody will not dig it up?

Protecting our distant descendants in case we destroy our own civilization and go back to the stone age is a niche concern at best, akin to the zombie apocalypse.

Even if there's an all-out nuclear war or runaway global warming, I think it's overwhelmingly likely that a sizable population will remain to safeguard our scientific knowledge. Instead of stone age, we'll probably end up with the situation in Alita: Battle Angel. In that case, I would be more worried about rogue groups digging up dangerous stuff on purpose than about anybody 20K years in the future.

Besides, we can read Egyptian hieroglyphs pretty well, and the Egyptians weren't even trying to create a writing system to last millennia. Armed with a much better understanding of linguistics and anthropology, I'm sure we can do a better job with our warnings signs.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#87

Post by victorp13 »

intopieces wrote: post #11
tjpnz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's our best chance going forward (short of Fusion) but how do you go about calming people who are quite rightfully scared by it? I live in Japan which has a long history with nuclear but after Fukushima people take to the streets whenever a nuclear plant comes (or is announced to come) back online. If a country like Japan can still screw nuclear up so monumentally I don't hold out much hope for the rest of the worl…

They are not "rightfully scared." Even if you take the highest number of death estimates -- all the way from the initial incident through the people who died in evacuation all the way those who will die of cancer in 20 years -- the death toll is staggeringly low compared to carbon emissions. It just so happens that radiation is scary and deaths happen all at once.

Don't just count deaths: Nuclear fallout has profound long-term negative effects that coal accidents do not. At Fukushima, nearly 80.000 people are still displaced, almost eight years later. Source: http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/

Re: The Nuclear Option

#88

Post by usrusr »

ShorsHammer wrote: post #57
rurounijones wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And pumping water uphill is a regional solution that requires specific regional geography, to me that does not class as "scalable". I should be more specific in that to me "scalable" is a solution that can be deployed anywhere without require specific regional properties. Maybe you think this is unneeded and that a lot of region specific solutions can cover the storage requirements. However another posted did point o…

Unless there is big improvements in battery tech I don't see it as a solution. Lithium batteries have their own environmental problems and die after 10 years. Pumped hydro requires the geography, building new capacity tends to flood large areas and release huge amounts of greenhouse gases initially. Simply lifting weights on cranes or rail tracks is looking more efficient and can be adapted anywhere. It will probably…

> Simply lifting weights on cranes or rail tracks is looking more efficient and can be adapted anywhere.

The energy density of that kind of scheme is a joke. Thought experiment: a fully charged Tesla, how often could it climb a hill the size of that crane if it skips recuperation on the downhill leg? That's how much lower the energy density of a crane storage would be. Pumped storage works (where the geography allows it) because water is by far the cheapest and the most easily transported ballast and geographic height differences dwarf almost every human made structure.

If you want something that scales everywhere, look no further than compressed air. It's usually ignored because of the big thermal losses, but if you have a direct application for coolant they are not that bad and even without, it serves as an almost trivial lower bound to the storage problem. We can calculate how much intermittent energy production we would need with compressed air to serve a power demand profile and everything else is just a possible improvement.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#89

Post by Tsubasachan »

godelski wrote: post #62
rurounijones wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a sidenote. I also have trouble understanding the mindset of people who argue purely on economic basis. It seems that telling out grandchildren "Sorry you inherited a ruined climate, but we didn't want to spend the money at the time to avoid it" is a rational decision. (And hey, maybe some people think it is; but I can't)

I honestly think they fall into one of 2 camps: 1) They don't believe in anthropocentric climate change (probably deflecting by taking this stance) 2) They don't believe the economic destructive power of climate change. Be that by disbelief, thinking it is over stated, or just not being good at thinking about the future (which a lot of humans aren't. We're terrible at it)

The Netherlands believes in climate change, understands what a rise in sea level means and will not build a single nuclear reactor.

Spending 15 billion on a reactor just isn't economically sound business.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#90

Post by ben_w »

pdonis wrote: post #65
ben_w wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle. On the contrary, two solutions already exist. Batteries are expensive, but (IIRC) still cheaper than nuclear, though more expensive than fossil fuels. And the losses of planet-scale grids are small compared to the cost- advantage that solar…

> the losses of planet-scale grids are small compared to the cost-advantage that solar has. You could literally power your home at night from the sun hitting the other side of the planet. You're comparing apples and widgets. The losses of planet-scale grids are way too large to make it even feasible to power your home at night from the other side of the planet: not enough power would be left by the time it got to you…

“””the authors measured the corona loss of a 765kV, 3 phase, and bundled transmission line to be about 1.87kW/km in fair weather. This amounts to only about a 0.083% loss over a 1000km line. In bad weather, however, the authors measured the loss to be 84.3kW/km, or about a 3.7% loss.””” - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/

3.7% loss = (100-3.7)/100 multiplier per 1000km = 0.963

Half world circumstance = 20,000km -> 0.963^20 = ~0.47 multiplier

“””New US Solar Record — 2.155 Cents Per kWh””” - https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/14/new-us-solar-record-2-1...

-> 2.155 cents per 0.47 kWh = 4.5 cents per kWh from the opposite point of the planet, assuming the worst case studied in the first link on the entire route.

It could be 80% losses (0.2 kWh receives for every 1 kWh produced) and still be effective both from ‘cost’ and ‘maximum possible power output’ perspectives.

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