81–90 of 672 posts
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All nuclear waste ever produced in the US could be stored in an area the size of a football field
You should check up on that Shellenberger meme before you spread it. That was is just the fuel and fuel is just a small part of all the waste. https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
no one ever mentions nuclear proliferation risk associated with the production of plutonium.
it does get mentioned, and you can have nuclear power without producing plutonium.
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"Modern tech" is still vastly inferior to nuclear power. Think of it as humanity scoring a roll of the dice to discover 22nd century technology in the 20th.
Depends what you mean by "inferior". A horse-drawn carriage has less carbon emissions than an automobile, doesn't it? However, that's not the sole criteria.
Is it? Especially if counting by miles of travel, I'm not sure about it. Also, if by "carbon emissions" I believe we mean "greenhouse gas emissions" -- including methane yes.
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> Nuclear power plants take too long to plan, build and bring online. IIRC it's at least 11 years It's crazy what people come to believe. To generalize the pathetic bureaucratic failures like the EPR to all model couldn't be farther from reality. Russian commercialized VVER 1200 models take 57 month to build. Their successor, the VVER-TOI take 40 month, so 3.5 year to build. It output 1300MWe Besides the russian comp…
Yeah these things don't take 11 years to build. Government makes them take that long.
Nuclear engineer here. If you want a deep dive into US reactor development history, I wrote this up on a vacation. https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html My take on the more modern economics is here https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html And waste here https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
Russophobia aside, the next-gen russian nuclear model (first exporter in the world, of nuclear plants) is built in 3.5 years, which is state of the art. And at the same time has a high throughput (1300MWe) (much higher than the billion dollar mini-reactor fad) and state of the art longevity. It's very difficult for me to find the actual prices, of the different nuclear plants models competitors, but since most of the…
Why don't you click from there to [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant and on to [2] http://www.akkuyu.com ? Which is about a project in progress in Turkey, having 4 of them. Just skimming [2] gives: > The stake of Rosatom State Corporation in the project is 99.2%. The total project cost is estimated at 20 billion US dollars.
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Most of the waste is Uranium which can be put back into reactors, the most dangerous long-lived element in the waste is Plutonium which is also a good nuclear fuel. Remove those elements plus the higher actinides (Neptunium, Americium, Curium, ...) and almost all of the radioactivity in the fission products has decayed by 500 years... It's less radioactive at that point than the Uranium ore was when it was mined. Bur…
Haha. Flagged? I really wanted to know more about the racial motivation behind burying nuclear waste! Guess it's a sensitive topic around here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
with this result
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
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Depends what you mean by "inferior". A horse-drawn carriage has less carbon emissions than an automobile, doesn't it? However, that's not the sole criteria.
> horse-drawn carriage has less carbon emissions than an automobile Is it? Especially if counting by miles of travel, I'm not sure about it. Also, if by "carbon emissions" I believe we mean "greenhouse gas emissions" -- including methane yes.
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Why don't you click from there to [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant and on to [2] http://www.akkuyu.com ? Which is about a project in progress in Turkey, having 4 of them. Just skimming [2] gives: > The stake of Rosatom State Corporation in the project is 99.2%. The total project cost is estimated at 20 billion US dollars.
yes so 5 billion per plant and ~4 year construction time. However some of this cost might be a lucrative margin for russia? The estimated construction cost of a VVER 1200 on wikipedia is 1.4 billion. 1.5 with interests. The rest would be frozen money for operating the plant during its 60-80 year lifespan? Or constructions costs would be higher than estimated? Expected annual generation is 35 billion kWh when complete…
(According to the graphics from Wikipedia)
I am reminded of an amusing incident in the Netherlands: the prime minister talked about new reactors and made the faux pas of mentioning specific locations. Immediately a shit storm brew up and he was forced to publicly apologize. Keep it vague. We all love nuclear now. But not a single spade in the ground by order of NIMBY!